“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

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. The results reveal something entirely new not only about this one remarkable, walleyed life, but about the way we tell queer love stories. As Shapland reckons with the expanding and collapsing distance between her and McCullers, she sees how McCullers’s story has become a way to articulate something about herself. Shapland recognizes herself in the letters’ language-but does not see McCullers as history has portrayed her.Īnd 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. 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.

My autobiography of carson mccullers