My Autobiography of Carson McCullers

Weaves together biography and memoir … Shards of the author’s own life glitter amid the story of McCullers’s triumphs and struggles … A lively cast of walk-on characters includes Tennessee Williams, Elizabeth Bowen, Edith Sitwell and Robert Lowell … But it is Shapland’s identification with her subject that energises the book … Only an accomplished writer could marshal this tricky material in order to enmesh two stories. The reader sees McCullers afresh in these pages … The politics of female queerness are central to this book, and Shapland handles the subject adroidy. At the same time, this volume, which I admire and recommend without reservation, speaks clearly and universally of the human heart, and specifically of the human heart in conflict with itself – Sara Wheeler * Literary Review *
The truth about Carson McCullers, the great American gothic writer, is finally told … What makes this such an unusual work, far removed from conventional biography, is that it’s as much Shapland’s story as it is McCullers’s. In the process of recasting McCullers, Shapland finds her own identity … My Autobiography of Carson McCullers is the result: 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 – Melanie Reid * The Times (Ireland) *
A very interesting and innovative work * Irish Times *
The kind of state-of-the-form reckoning that makes one wish there were more like it * New York Times Book Review *
Weird and un-categorisable (in a good way) * Guardian (Nonfiction to look out for in 2021) *
Intelligent and invigorating … it is sharp-eyed and sensitive about biography as a form, and it is a vital piece of life-writing in its own right * New Statesman *
A fascinating and intimate examination of the work of archives, research and historic preservation as well as the arc of identity and social construction … [an] idiosyncratic and entirely winning book * Observer *
A moving record of love at the margins * New Yorker *
In lucid, distilled, honest prose, Jenn Shapland teaches us about McCullers, the desire for recognition, loneliness, the complexities of queer history, the seductions and resistances of the archive and, all throughout, love – Maggie Nelson

Jenn Shapland is a writer and archivist living in New Mexico. Her first book, My Autobiography of Carson McCullers, was a finalist for the National Book Award and the Lambda Literary award. Her essays have won a Pushcart Prize, a Rabkin Foundation Award for art journalism, and a Howard Foundation Fellowship. She has a PhD in English from the University of Texas at Austin and is currently writing a collection of essays called Thin Skin.

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