My Autobiography of Carson McCullers: A Memoir

by Jenn Shapland Narrated by Jenn Shapland

Overview

Winner of the Publishing Triangle Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction

Winner of a Lambda Literary Award

Finalist for the National Book Award

Longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction

How do you tell the real story of someone misremembered-an icon and idol-alongside your own? Jenn Shapland's celebrated debut is both question and answer: an immersive, surprising exploration of one of America's most beloved writers, alongside a genre-defying examination of identity, queerness, memory, obsession, and love.

Shapland is a graduate student when she first uncovers letters written to Carson McCullers by a woman named Annemarie. Though Shapland recognizes herself in the letters, which are intimate and unabashed in their feelings, she does not see McCullers as history has portrayed her. Her curiosity gives way to fixation, not just with this newly discovered side of McCullers's life, but with how we tell queer love stories. Why, Shapland asks, are the stories of women paved over by others' narratives? What happens when constant revision is required of queer women trying to navigate and self-actualize in straight spaces? And what might the tracing of McCullers's life-her history, her secrets, her legacy-reveal to Shapland about herself?

In smart, illuminating prose, Shapland interweaves her own story with McCullers's to create a vital new portrait of one of our nation's greatest literary treasures, and shows us how the writers we love and the stories we tell about ourselves make us who we are.

Editorial Reviews

The Oprah Magazine O

"Revelatory."

The Phi Beta Kappa Society

"Shapland herself has made a major contribution to the genre of autobiography."

The New Yorker

"A moving record of love at the margins."

Forbes

"Positively breathtaking."

The Los Angeles Review of Books

"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?"

Melissa Febos

"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."

Maggie Nelson

"Lucid, distilled, and honest."

Bustle

"A treatise on seeing yourself in someone else."

Autostraddle

"This book will change the way you think about the truth."

Electric Literature

"A gorgeous, brilliant book."

Carmen Maria Machado

"Gorgeous, symphonic, tender, and brilliant."

R.O. Kwon

"Remarkable. . . . A biography that’s also a memoir, a story of obsession and longing."

The Charlotte Observer

"A truly brilliant approach to biography. Bold, brave and fascinating."

GOOP

"A succinct, thought-provoking exploration of women’s sexuality and the language that has been used to describe and limit our desires throughout history."

NPR

"My Autobiography Of Carson McCullers asks sharp questions not just about the details of McCullers’ life but, more broadly, how we understand historical figures who confound the social expectations of their time (and our own) and how, in turn, they can help us understand ourselves."

Star Tribune

"Sensational."

Literary Hub

"A beautifully written and hard-to-categorize meditation on Carson McCullers and the hidden literary history of queer women."

The New York Review of Books

"Stimulating . . . part fan letter, part detective story, and part steely corrective."

Chicago Tribune

"An intriguing, genre-blending debut."

A.V. Club

"Shapland brings a sharp modern lens to her reading of McCullers’ (and her own) life."

Observer

"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."

Emma Straub

"Mind-bending!"

Lambda Literary

"An exquisitely rendered map of discovery—of an icon, and of a self."

The New York Times Book Review

"The kind of state-of-the-form reckoning that makes one wish there were more like it."

Vox

"A beautiful consideration of the nature of proof, and of self and identity and queerness and history and progress."

"Best Books of 2020" Book Riot

"This book uncovers ways women’s queer history has been ignored. It’s a personal, powerful, genre-bending account of literary discovery."

Harper's BAZAAR

"Two books in one: an examination of a famous author whose narrative has been posthumously taken away from her, but also a vital memoir of Shapland’s own experience as a queer woman looking for stories about people like her."

Molly Moore

"A mystery, a love story, a biography, several hearts on the page—I so loved this generous offering."

From the Publisher

"Jenn Shapland's narration of her audiobook embodies a deeply personal journey.... Her performance feels like an intimate podcast. Shapland's voice reflects her self-discovery, making this listening experience seem far too short."
—AudioFile Magazine

“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. . . . Shapland’s book is the kind of state-of-the-form reckoning that makes one wish there were more like it.”
- The New York Times Book Review

“An unpretentious, moving record of love at the margins.”
- The New Yorker

“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?”
- The Los Angeles Review of Books

“Her stimulating book is part fan letter, part detective story, and part steely corrective.”
- The New York Review of Books

“This book will change the way you think about the truth. . . . 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.”
- Autostraddle

“This is a gorgeous, brilliant book that is all but guaranteed to resonate with queer folks, word nerds, and readers everywhere.”
- Electric Literature

“This book uncovers ways women’s queer history has been ignored. It’s a personal, powerful, genre-bending account of literary discovery.”
- Book Riot, "Best Books of 2020"

“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.”
- Kirkus Reviews

“Sleek, elegant. . . . both a memoir of her own coming-out and a nuanced exploration of her magnificent obsession with the Georgia author known for her sensitive portrayals of misfits.”
- Atlanta Journal-Constitution

“A fine narrative of how the best writers express the deepest secrets of the heart.”
- Library Journal

“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

“You don’t have to be a Carson McCullers fan to admire this remarkable book. It’s a biography that’s also a memoir, a story of obsession and longing. Captivating and trenchant and moving, Shapland’s genre-mixing debut will stay with me a long time.”
—R.O. Kwon, author of The Incendiaries

“Gorgeous, symphonic, tender, and brilliant, My Autobiography of Carson McCullers is a monumental achievement. In this genre-bending work of nonfiction, Shapland brings the full weight of her intellect to bear on one of literature’s most important questions: How do queer readers find the truth―and themselves―between the lines?”
—Carmen Maria Machado

MARCH 2020 - AudioFile

Jenn Shapland's narration of her audiobook embodies a deeply personal journey. Originally embarking on a project to write Carson McCullers's biography, Shapland then decided to provide listeners with her own story woven throughout McCullers's history. Ultimately, her audiobook recounts how she discovered her own truths as the research progressed. McCullers, author of THE HEART IS A LONELY HUNTER, was twice married to an abusive man. In her last years, McCullers came to connect deeply with her therapist, Mary; her letters from this period reflect a woman openly embracing her queerness. Shapland discusses how her work in researching McCullers gave her insight into her own identity. Her performance feels like an intimate podcast. Shapland's voice reflects her self-discovery, making this listening experience seem far too short. S.P.C. © AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine

Kirkus Reviews

2019-09-29
An intimate look at the life and loves of Carson McCullers (1917-1967).

"To tell another person's story," Shapland observes in her deft, graceful literary debut, "a writer must make that person some version of herself, must find a way to inhabit her." The author knew little about McCullers before she became an intern at the Harry Ransom Center, a repository for writers' and artists' archives at the University of Texas. Responding to a scholar's request, she discovered eight letters from Swiss writer and photographer Annemarie Schwarzenbach to McCullers that struck Shapland immediately as "intimate, suggestive" love letters. For Shapland, at the time suffering the end of a "major, slow-burning catastrophe," the letters marked a "turning point." Within a week, she cut her hair short. "Within a year," she writes, "I would be more or less comfortably calling myself a lesbian for the first time." The letters inspired further research, focused especially on McCullers' sexuality, about which Shapland found intriguing evidence in transcripts of her taped therapy sessions with Dr. Mary Mercer, begun when McCullers was 41 and which McCullers described "as an attempt of writing her autobiography." In addition, following the sessions, McCullers wrote letters to Mercer "awash in the joy of self-revelation" and her "love for Dr. Mary." The more Shapland discovered about McCullers, the more convinced she became that McCullers was a lesbian who had been intensely in love with several women. Identifying with McCullers "as a writer, as a queer person, as a chronically ill person," Shapland felt she had special insight into her subject's life. At the same time, looking to McCullers "as a role model," she wondered if she was "reading into her queerness": imposing her own life story, and her own needs, on McCullers, in part to rescue her from "retroactive closeting by peers and biographers." 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.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940173065322
Publisher:	Brilliance Audio
Publication date:	03/10/2020
Edition description:	Unabridged

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