my autobiography of carson mccullers by jenn shapland

The mid-20 th century author is mostly known for her master work, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, as well her later pieces like The Member of the Wedding and Ballad of Sad Cafe. I’ve chronicled my fascination with McCullers through this Heartlands site and in other places, like StreetLight. It’s an idiosyncratic way to look at McCullers’ life and an effective argument for biography as memoir. She becomes a character as much as McCullers and her own voyage of discovery, claiming her identity as a lesbian, is central to the narrative here. You can tell by the odd title of Shapland’s book that she claims a lot more of her subject than most biographers would. Everybody wanted a piece of her, including me.” (245) (And I count myself among them.) As she surveyed the landscape in writing her new book My Autobiography of Carson McCullers, she found that “everyone had a claim to lay, an attachment to prove.

Which is: not masculine, not feminine, but a both that becomes other.Jenn Shapland is no doubt right that those who fall under the spell of Carson McCullers are an obsessive lot. Here's how Shapland puts it: 'I've started making my own clothes in the years since I began this project, frustrated that clothes in stores don't really look or fit or feel the way I want to look and feel. The more Shapland learns about the legendary writer, the more she learns about herself and the more readers are apt to question the labels we impose on one another. Each is an outsider who is fascinating on her own but, together, they form a provocative look at what we reveal to the world and to ourselves. The neat trick this National Book Award finalist pulls is to balance the stories of McCullers and Shapland. In particular, she becomes obsessed by evidence McCullers was, like Shapland, a lesbian - evidence that previous biographers ignored. Jenn Shapland stumbles upon McCullers' papers at the University of Texas and intends to write about the 'The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter' novelist while staying at the famous Yaddo retreat for artists, where McCullers also did multiple stints. This winter, if you read just one book that seems to be a biography but turns into an autobiography and is really about the writer clarifying her identity as a lesbian, I don't know what to tell you because 'Why Fish Don't Exist' is sensational but so is 'My Autobiography of Carson McCullers.'

My autobiography of carson mccullers by jenn shapland