my autobiography of carson mccullers review

Her fixation on McCullers became a full-blown project, she lived for a while in McCullers’s former home in Georgia, surrounded by her clothes and other treasured possessions. Shapland wasn’t familiar with McCullers’s writing at the time but was so inspired by the image of the person she seemed to glimpse in the artefacts she uncovered, she felt empowered enough to finally come out as a lesbian herself. She later unearthed a stash of material detailing McCullers’s intimate therapy sessions undertaken in the 1950s with Mary Mercer. Shapland became obsessed with McCullers after discovering love letters between her and Schwarzenbach buried in the archives where Shapland was working as an intern. Although I’ve always assumed McCullers was queer so Shapland’s ideas were neither revelatory nor revolutionary as far as I’m concerned.

It didn’t help that the loose structure felt more chaotic than organic, and Shapland’s musings on McCullers’s possible lesbian identity were vague and a little repetitive. I wasn’t expecting to find this so heavy-going I’m fascinated by the writer Carson McCullers as well as numerous members of her circle from friends like Gypsy Rose Lee and Elizabeth Bowen to potential lovers such as the beguiling Annemarie Schwarzenbach, but there was something about Jenn Shapland’s approach to her subject matter that I found less than engaging.

Through correspondence, firsthand accounts, and conversations with Carson's doctor and longtime companion Mary Mercer, she begins to carefully unfurl a long-erased history. She traces Carson's steps back in bits and pieces, working at Yaddo where Carson once worked, writing and thinking in the same bathtub that Carson once wrote and thought in at the house where she convalesced from debilitating illness. The scholar who requests them never follows up, but Jenn, feeling a deep kinship with their words, plunges into an obsession, literary and otherwise. What she finds stuns her: a clear record of fierce romantic love between Annemarie, a Swiss writer and known ladykiller, and the married (reportedly straight) Carson. One day, during two years spent working at the Harry Ransom Center, carefully arranging and managing access to the most intimate and personal effects of deceased authors and artists, Jenn Shapland receives a request for materials from a scholar: a batch of letters between legendary Southern author Carson McCullers and Annemarie Clarac-Schwarzenbach, a woman that she's never heard of. Urgent and personal, Jenn Shapland's debut brings rare freedom and wild empathy to the biographical form. Swirling, lyrical, and propulsive, My Autobiography of Carson McCullers is by turns memoir, field notes from an obsession, and highly subjective chronicle of a creative life lived toward love and the process of writing.

My autobiography of carson mccullers review