my autobiography of carson mccullers review

Parts of my life that had for a long time felt like fantasy suddenly felt both real and somehow historical. I had my own similar relationships with women and with writing, but I had never seen those conversations represented outside my own experience. It was clear that both women were writers engaged in lifelong creative practice, and their relationship offered support and validation of that work in a world that may not have valued it as they did.

But what really drew me in was the way they toggled between the women’s relationship and their work. The letters from Annemarie Schwarzenbach to Carson McCullers that I came upon in the Ransom Center’s manuscript collection were so frank and passionate. What were some of those first moments like for you when you began to realize you had stumbled upon something really compelling? This was a refreshingly honest confession. You mention early on in your book that though you’d always been drawn to McCullers’s work, you hadn’t actually read any of it when you came across her letters. The more I read and researched, the more I began to question the versions of her life that exist and continue to circulate.”Īnd the more Shapland discovered about McCullers, the more she also discovered about herself. Rather, it is a story that has been written over, revised, and adjusted to suit various people’s needs. “But Carson’s life is not an unwritten story. “Biographers usually seek to fill in gaps, to add narrative to strict chronology, to render a person’s life so that it reads like a nineteenth-century novel,” Shapland writes in My Autobiography of Carson McCullers. Shapland, who was then coming to terms with her own sexual identity, sensed there was more to uncover. Perhaps this “otherness” came from McCullers’s struggle with chronic, debilitating illness she suffered from her first stroke at the age of 24, was partially paralyzed by 30, and died from a stroke in 1967 at the age of 50.īut perhaps it was McCullers’s sexuality - stifled, kept secret - that had helped imbue her work with the perspective of someone on the outside, someone grappling with the life she has and the life she wishes for. Misfits and outcasts often feature prominently in her novels, short stories, poems, and more. Shapland, who at the time was working as an intern in the archives of the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, Austin, knew that McCullers was, in a way, a representative of the “other” in society. The two women had been friends - that was no secret - and yet the letters suggested an intimacy that went beyond anything platonic. Jenn Shapland knew she had stumbled upon something remarkable when she discovered letters between writer Carson McCullers and photographer and journalist Annemarie Schwarzenbach.

My autobiography of carson mccullers review