My Autobiography of Carson McCullers , as its too-clever-by-half-sounding title implies, is neither memoir nor biography ... such a declaration cannot disguise the fact that her (over) identification with McCullers takes us nowhere that is very productive ... She wants to name lesbians – to use the word, over and over – not only as a point of principle, but because it does her such good. I understand this. But there is a problem here. In all the pointing, McCullers’s work is lost; Shapland is keen on the novels’ queerness, but never gets too involved with their literary achievements. Like many of the other women in the book, she is seen almost entirely through the prism of her sexuality ... how reductive this is and how antiquated. It’s a diminishment that invites another kind of invisibility and I think McCullers (and all of them) would have despised it ... Still, I’m glad to have read My Autobiography of Carson McCullers . Its mere existence stands as a warning of the cul-de-sac into which publishing has lately wandered (I mean, run, blindfolded, at full tilt). It could not be more modish, from the floating paragraphs of its fractured narrative to its breathless quoting of Maggie Nelson (of whom, incidentally, I’m a fan). In the US, it was a National Book award finalist; Carmen Maria Machado calls it – preposterously, given the single note it sounds – 'symphonic'. Why the dazzlement? Why won’t anyone take this book on? Because I’m here to tell you that it often makes no sense ... What’s funny about this is that before I read Shapland’s book, I’d no idea anyone believed McCullers was straight. What’s much less funny is its utter futility. What a dead end. For writing, for the imagination, for empathy.
... a hard-won inquiry into how we seek out the truth of ourselves and others in ways that often, by necessity, aren’t straightforward, that arrive in our lives in glimmering bits and shards ... The difficulty in overcoming this instinct to code and conceal is what gives Shapland’s book its considerable stakes ... Shapland’s book is the kind of state-of-the-form reckoning that makes one wish there were more like it. The truth is, doing the work of retrospective, corrective rearranging (pretty much the job description of any critic or academic working today) is never without risk. Surely, the more transparently we acknowledge the stakes, the more likely we are to arrive at a payoff. After all, it’s often by looking back that we move the conversation forward, and by inhabiting the lives of others that we might glimpse pieces of our own.
Shapland’s research uncovers one censorship after another: euphemisms, silence, and outright denial by parties competing to control McCullers’ story—a willful closeting. But if one could animate this book, it’d be with the cartoon trope of the exploding closet ... What makes My Autobiography Of Carson McCullers so different in spirit from other takes on McCullers’ story is Shapland’s open partiality. It takes a queer to know one, and as Shapland immerses herself in McCullers’ life...she traces her own 'protracted becoming' ... By drawing on the work of Audre Lorde, Eileen Myles, Susan Sontag, and Maggie Nelson, Shapland brings a sharp modern lens to her reading of McCullers’ (and her own) life.
...brilliantly interweaves Carson’s personal history with Shapland’s own ... The question that propels Shapland’s book is not whether or not Carson was a lesbian; she’s not trying to prove, exactly. What she’s trying to do is see herself in history, show herself (and us) that Carson and other queer people have always lived, always loved, always made community for themselves ... At its core, Shapland’s book is about gaps—in stories, in language, in history, in ourselves—and how we attempt to fill them ... She is a diligent, perceptive, and heartful researcher. Following along with Shapland-as-detective is a delight, and the mystery she sets out to solve is one of those wicked unsolvables: how do we account for the apertures in language, history, and identity?
What makes this such an unusual work, far removed from conventional biography, is that it’s as much Shapland’s personal story as it is McCullers’. In the process of recasting McCullers, Shapland also finds her own identity, interweaving the two stories ... impeccably young, modern and fresh, an assertion of lesbian liberation ... Political and at times polemical, it’s a call to arms to reappraise past lives ... beautifully and sparsely written.
... sensational ... The neat trick this National Book Award finalist pulls is to balance the stories of McCullers and Shapland. Each is an outsider who is fascinating on her own but, together, they form a provocative look at what we reveal to the world and to ourselves. The more Shapland learns about the legendary writer, the more she learns about herself and the more readers are apt to question the labels we impose on one another.
Physical objects become a focus for Shapland’s meditation, reflection, and questions about McCullers’s life and essence. They pull McCullers from the past into a present mediated by Shapland’s storytelling. Some of Shapland’s best writing focuses on extricating broader meaning from these tangible objects ... Shapland uncovers vibrant connections between mid-century lesbian writers such as Patricia Highsmith and Jane Bowles and the other women around them, mapping intimacies and rivalries and bringing to life a powerful imaginary of mid-century queer life ... in Shapland’s complex assemblage, readers uncover and intuit their own meanings from the gatherings, clustering, and collecting of material. Shapland combines these medleys with lyrical prose befitting a poet; through evocative lyricism, she resists the impulse of collage, to contain the gatherings into an object that evokes or suggests a third meaning, pressing to explore multiplicities of meanings, including the possibility that meaning cannot be determined ... Shapland explores with extraordinary sensitivity McCullers’s refusal of...gendered plots, even as stewards of her legacy want to make her compliant, gender normative, conforming to an image of the independent woman genius.
This fragmented construction (the book is split into 80 short fragments, or 'chapters') isn’t simply an aesthetic choice; it also works as a crucial comment on the genre of women’s life narratives and the construction of self ... fragmentation and queer reading and research practices are a critical collapsing of epistemology and ontology ... Shapland finds this epistemological and ontological collapse in attempting to make sense of the material and the written through theorizing biography as genre itself ... as My Autobiography posits...habits of readerly projection aren’t inherently good or bad. Whether it’s my projection onto Shapland or Shapland’s projection of queer love onto those initial letters between McCullers and Schwarzenbach, My Autobiography illustrates that what matters is the kind of space for creation these projections open.
... [a] spare but impassioned memoir ... Her stimulating book is part fan letter, part detective story, and part steely corrective to the influence of the guardians of McCullers’s estate and others who wanted to normalize her ... But Shapland has slightly oversold her thesis about the closeting of McCullers. Scholars and critics have been exploring the queer elements of McCullers’s work and even referring to her as lesbian or bisexual or trans or gender nonconforming for decades—often with less 'evidence' than is now available. Only in her bibliography does Shapland mention Sarah Schulman, for instance, a prominent lesbian writer whose multigenre exploration of McCullers—essays, a play, a projected novel, and an as yet unrealized film—spans twenty years.6 Similarly, although Shapland visited McCullers’s childhood home in Georgia, fondling her possessions and breathing her air, she avoided meeting anyone who had known her and who might offer competing impressions: 'None of these is my Carson.'
Though her book is composed of vignettes that read like entries in an archive...Shapland is led more by feeling and response ... Shapland’s intimate admissions are, like her subject...elusive ... I so wished for more [confessional] moments ... the aim of [the book]: searching, seeing and recognizing ... Shapland yearns to recognize Carson and Mary’s relationship for what it is, and then to extend the validation to herself and then all women who love women.
Shapland is meticulous and shines when she loses herself in her material. Her project of proof-finding defies the historical trend of demanding explicit records of sexual encounters to even acknowledge a woman’s queerness in favor of a stranger, more personal methodology: embodiment.
The title of Jenn Shapland’s first book, My Autobiography of Carson McCullers, cleverly shows her goal of creating a genre-bending book, a combination of memoir and biography ... Shapland’s analysis of McCullers’s experience is well researched and gently persuasive. Her contemplation of her own life is both charming and meaningful. The most powerful aspect of this lovely book, though, is Shapland’s highlighting of the often-invisible link between biography and memoir. Although she does not argue that all biographers should include their own story as extensively as she does, Shapland shows that the assumptions and questions that writers (and readers) bring from their own lives to another person’s life history can dramatically change what we see.
...an exquisitely rendered map of discovery–of an icon, and of a self. It asks, with humor and tenderness, who gets to tell the story of their life? How do we understand each other’s stories? And is everyone queer? (Answer: yes).
'What is the precise evidence for love?' Shapland asks in her stunning, full-length nonfiction debut...Throughout her riveting and tender investigation into this question, Shapland travels the country chasing down letters, photographs, and objects in order to uncover the truth about the love life of an oft-overlooked titan of American fiction ... This book will change the way you think about the truth. It’s about McCullers, yes, but also about how one builds a biography ... Shapland possesses the perfect storm of talents to push McCullers’s love life, and beautiful writing, into the light of this century during a moment when we need all the queer heroes we can get. In My Autobiography of Carson McCullers, we regain one hero, and discover another: McCullers and Shapland, respectively. I recommend adding both of these women to your 2020 reading lists.
Shapland does so much more than define this relationship and retell the author’s life story; she questions the reasons for her intense reaction and articulates harmful shortcomings, not only in Carson McCullers’s biography, but literary history in general: a persistent refusal to tell queer women’s narratives, by downplaying or, worse, omitting desire and relationships between women. In this brilliant debut, Shapland brings the reader along on a quest through libraries and literature and writing communities, as she explores her understanding of Carson’s life as a queer narrative and, most significantly, as a literary, historic narrative in relation to her own queer identity ... Hints of a deeper understanding of Carson pull the reader forward, but it’s Shapland’s meditations on the experience of the research and the motivations of this desire that are most compelling ... In a book with blended, overlapping narratives, with research and personal essay and literary criticism all woven together in a layered text, this is a powerfully clear call to action. Hopefully it resounds.
My Autobiography of Carson McCullers is structured...in a way that feels conversational. Sensitive to the false narratives biographers sometimes impose, Shapland tries to avoid clichés, in particular the idea that McCullers’ relationships with women were insignificant compared to her 'tortured' relationship with Reeves McCullers, whom she married at nineteen, divorced, and remarried ... Although there is a narrative arc, reading My Autobiography of Carson McCullers feels more like listening in as Shapland thinks out loud about McCullers and herself—about why we cling to labels, what it means to write a biography, and why she decided not to sit in McCullers’ blue chair. Implicitly, she invites us into the conversation, to grapple in whatever way we want with identity and more.
If McCullers provided salvation, helping Shapland emerge once and for all from the closet, now the younger writer has an opportunity to return the favor. But she is wary ... This circumspection is unnecessary and dulls the work’s effect. Authorial hesitation is fine—probably commendable!—but its recurrence feels less like an intellectual complication and more like nervous tic. To be queer—different in whatever fashion you are—is superb preparation for the task of criticism. You meet Harriet the Spy with that frisson of recognition. You read A Separate Peace waiting for the teen protagonists to kiss (fraternal love, give me a break). This is a survival strategy (You are not alone in the world) and we learn to deploy it on the page and in reality ... Shapland’s is a quest for the self ... My Autobiography might have dwelt even longer than it does on the resonances between the lives of author and subject: Shapland cuts herself off, as though she’s using McCullers cheaply. But we all read selfishly. This text is more than mere fan letter, and if the author had allowed herself to go further, I wonder what she might have found? ... This book might have been broader, a more robust hybrid of memoir and criticism. I will say, though, that it made me return to The Heart is a Lonely Hunter; I sense that Shapland would consider that mission accomplished.
She discovers a woman who deeply loved other women while lacking the terms and perhaps the space to define her queer desire. Celebrating McCullers, love, and the idea that every story told includes something of its teller, Shapland writes an involving literary journey of the self.
...[a] deft, graceful literary debut ... Shapland interweaves candid self-questioning and revealing personal stories with a nuanced portrait of a writer who confessed her loves were 'untouchable' and her feelings 'inarticulable.' A sensitive chronicle of a biographer’s search for truth.
