My Autobiography of Carson McCullers by Jenn Shapland

My Autobiography of Carson McCullers by Jenn Shapland
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

“To tell another person’s story,” Jenn Shapland comments, “a writer must make that person some version of herself, must find a way to inhabit her.”
"All women are lesbians," according to Jill Johnston, even if they only love themselves. The author of this book, Jenn Shapland, uses her exploration of McCullers' sexuality and gender to research her own identity as a lesbian writer. As she pores through McCullers' papers, letters, therapy records, in at least four archives (U of TX Austin, Duke, Columbia, GA, and NYPL), she's trying to determine with whom the twice-married McCullers had relationships. She married Reeves McCullers twice and lived with several men while pursuing different women. There were many queer women writers who crossed her path while she lived in February House in NYC or at the Yaddo writing retreat in New York (Janet Flanner, Katherine Anne Porter, Patricia Highsmith, Jane Bowles, Gypsy Rose Lee, the director of Yaddo, Elizabeth Ames, who was homophobically attacked by Robert Lowell for Communist sympathies during the red scares of the fifties) Described are her close relationships with Swiss writer Annemarie Schwarzenbach, and with her therapist, Dr. Mary Mercer). Of course, affectionate letters notwithstanding, it is a challenge to try to determine the depth of passion in these relationships and the mixture of memoir and biography challenged at times, but I stayed interested. Microchapters help. McCullers was a dynamic, empathetic artist who suffered from ill health (rheumatic heart trouble generating numerous strokes, ten surgeries for paralysis in her left hand, removal of a breast) and alcoholism.. She traveled extensively and made a fetish of fashion. She wrote eight books, several plays, most dealing with loneliness and unrequited love which figured prominently in my teenage reading. When one wearies of reading scholarship, the story of Shapland and her partner, Chelsea, animates this unique memoir and sends us back to the work of McCullers.

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