My Autobiography Of Carson McCullers

A Memoir

Jenn Shapland

While working as an intern in the archives at the Harry Ransom Center, Jenn Shapland encounters the love letters of Carson McCullers and a woman named Annemarie – letters that are tender, intimate, and unabashed in their feelings. Shapland recognizes herself in the letters’ language-but does not see McCullers as history has portrayed her. And so, Shapland is compelled to undertake a recovery of the full narrative and language of McCullers’s life: she wades through the therapy transcripts; she stays at McCullers’s childhood home, where she lounges in her bathtub and eats delivery pizza; she relives McCullers’s days at her beloved Yaddo. As Shapland reckons with the expanding and collapsing distance between her and McCullers, she sees the way McCullers’s story has become a way to articulate something about herself. The results reveal something entirely new not only about this one remarkable, walleyed life, but about the way we tell queer love stories. In genre-defying vignettes, Jenn Shapland interweaves her own story with Carson McCullers’s to create a vital new portrait of one of America’s most beloved writers, and shows us how the writers we love and the stories we tell about ourselves make us who we are’–

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“You do not need to be a queer woman, a lover of Carson McCuller’s fiction, or interested in the mysterious junctures between our own lives and those of our favorite artists to love this book, but for those of us who are those things, Jenn Shapland’s memoir is a particular trove of delights. My favorite biographies are full of historical literary gossip and interested in the shadow selves of public persons. My favorite memoirs are those that scrutinize the self as an unreliable source of narrative truth and the one we must nonetheless rely upon. My Autobiography of Carson McCullers manages to do all of this in earnest and honest and riveting vignettes. It is a detective story and a dissection of selfhood, a puzzle every piece of which pleased me as it clicked into place.” ~ Melissa Febos, author of Abandon Me and Whip Smart

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Details

ISBN	9781947793286
Genre	Autobiography/Biography; Memoir
Publication Date	04-Feb-20
Publisher	Tin House Books
Format	Hardcover
LoC Classification	HQ75.4.S53 .A3 2020
Rating	NotRated
Subject	Lesbians – Biography. – United States
BookID	15205

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My Autobiography Of Carson McCullers by Jenn Shapland