My Autobiography of Carson McCullers by Jenn Shapland

My Autobiography of Carson McCullers
By Jenn Shapland
Tin House Books, 2020

The title of Jenn Shapland’s first book, My Autobiography of Carson McCullers, cleverly shows her goal of creating a genre-bending book, a combination of memoir and biography. Unlike most researchers who have written about Carson McCullers, Shapland is not trying to write a traditional or comprehensive biography. McCullers, the mid-twentieth-century white southern writer who explored themes of isolation, alienation, and otherness in novels such as The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter and The Member of the Wedding, has been the subject of such studies before, including the biographies written by Virginia Spencer Carr and Josyane Savigneau. Shepland, however, is interested in two more specific questions: how does a biographer’s perspective shape how the subject of the biography is understood, and how does the process of researching and writing a biography affect how a biographer thinks about herself.

My Autobiography of Carson McCullers begins with a story that frames the whole text: “Reeves asked Carson if she was a lesbian on the front porch of Carson’s house on Stark Avenue, after everyone had gone to sleep. I picture them on a swing, though I know for a fact that no such swing exists. Carson answered with a swift denial, wished aloud that she wasn’t one, then expressed plain uncertainty.” Reeves, to whom McCullers was twice married, suspected even before their first marriage that McCullers’s relationships with women (whom he began calling her “imaginary friends”) were relationships built on same-sex love and desire. McCullers was initially unsure how to address her future husband’s question, but Jenn Shapland successfully argues that soon McCullers’s queer sexuality was central to both her personality and her writing. The fact that biographers have mostly ignored and sometimes explicitly denied McCullers’s lesbianism exposes the problematic nature of the whole endeavor of traditional biography: instead of presenting truth, biographies are by definition shaped by the perspective of their authors. And their stories are often shaped by traditional cultural assumptions that now feel like injustice: “Historians demand proof from queer love stories,” she argues, to a degree “they never quite require from straight relationships.”

As a young intern sorting through manuscript boxes at the archives where she was worked, Shapland came across letters from Swiss author Annemarie Schwarzenbach to McCullers--correspondence the intern immediately recognized as love letters. “I had received letters like these,” writes Shapland. “I had written letters like these to the women I’d loved.” Her feeling of recognition began her deep fascination with McCullers. Over the next few years, Shapland read all of her fiction, then her correspondence, and then the transcripts of recorded therapy sessions (made at the McCullers’s request to serve as the scaffolding for an autobiography). Shapland also explored containers filled with the novelist’s clothing (from embroidered coats to nightgowns), followed McCullers to the Yaddo retreat for artists, and even spent four weeks living in her former home—sitting on that front porch with no porch swing. Shepland quickly found herself on intimate terms with her subject, referring to her subject as “Carson” and seeing her almost as if in a mirror. “To tell another person’s story,” writes Shepland, “a writer must make that person some version of herself, must find a way to inhabit her.”

The mirror Shapland found in McCullers clearly shaped her portrait of the novelist, although her cognizance of ambiguity and uncertainty also thread throughout the book. “Proving” that McCullers was a lesbian was not her goal. Instead, she shows how her beloved Carson helped her learn to tell her own story. For several years before her project, Shapland had maintained a relationship with a woman whom she presented not as her lover but as her roommate. As she began to uncover more about McCullers’s life, Shapland began to uncover herself: “Within a week of finding the letters, I would chop my hair short,” she writes. “Within a year I would be more or less comfortably calling myself a lesbian for the first time.” Seeing McCullers’s friends and biographers acknowledge the women she loved only as her imaginary friends, or her travelling companions, or her female acquaintances pushed Shapland to embrace her own lesbian identity and refuse to let it be erased.

Shapland’s analysis of McCullers’s experience is well researched and gently persuasive. Her contemplation of her own life is both charming and meaningful. The most powerful aspect of this lovely book, though, is Shapland’s highlighting of the often-invisible link between biography and memoir. Although she does not argue that all biographers should include their own story as extensively as she does, Shapland shows that the assumptions and questions that writers (and readers) bring from their own lives to another person’s life history can dramatically change what we see.

—Hannah Joyner is an independent historian living in Washington, D.C. Her work includes Unspeakable: The Story of Junius Wilson and From Pity to Pride: Growing Up Deaf in the Old South. You can find her on BookTube at https://www.youtube.com/c/HannahsBooks.