my autobiography of carson mccullers by jenn shapland

in Shapland’s complex assemblage, readers uncover and intuit their own meanings from the gatherings, clustering, and collecting of material. 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. Some of Shapland’s best writing focuses on extricating broader meaning from these tangible objects. They pull McCullers from the past into a present mediated by Shapland’s storytelling. Physical objects become a focus for Shapland’s meditation, reflection, and questions about McCullers’s life and essence. For writing, for the imagination, for empathy. What’s much less funny is its utter futility. What’s funny about this is that before I read Shapland’s book, I’d no idea anyone believed McCullers was straight. Why the dazzlement? Why won’t anyone take this book on? Because I’m here to tell you that it often makes no sense. In the US, it was a National Book award finalist Carmen Maria Machado calls it – preposterously, given the single note it sounds – 'symphonic'. 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). 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). Still, I’m glad to have read My Autobiography of Carson McCullers.

It’s a diminishment that invites another kind of invisibility and I think McCullers (and all of them) would have despised it.

how reductive this is and how antiquated.

Like many of the other women in the book, she is seen almost entirely through the prism of her sexuality. 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. 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. such a declaration cannot disguise the fact that her (over) identification with McCullers takes us nowhere that is very productive. My Autobiography of Carson McCullers, as its too-clever-by-half-sounding title implies, is neither memoir nor biography.

My autobiography of carson mccullers by jenn shapland