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Book | Searching... Andover - Memorial Hall Library | BIOGRAPHY MCCULLERS, CA. | 31330008916078 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Billerica Public Library | B/MCCULLERS | 33934004279825 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Haverhill Public Library | BIOG/SHAPLAND J | 31479007371916 | Searching... Unknown |
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Book | Searching... Lowell - Pollard Memorial Library | B MCCULLERS, C. | 31481005505115 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Manchester-by-the-Sea Public Library | 306.76 SHA 2020 | 32124001948397 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Merrimac Public Library | 92 MCC | 32125001416947 | Searching... Unknown |
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Book | Searching... Newbury Town Library | BIO MCCULLERS | 32127001289787 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Newburyport Public Library | BIOGRAPHY MCCULLERS C | 32128003862100 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... North Andover - Stevens Memorial Library | BIO MCCULLERS | 31478010141118 | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
How do you tell the real story of someone misremembered--an icon and idol--alongside your own? Jenn Shapland's celebrated debut is both question and answer: an immersive, surprising exploration of one of America's most beloved writers, alongside a genre-defying examination of identity, queerness, memory, obsession, and love.
Shapland is a graduate student when she first uncovers letters written to Carson McCullers by a woman named Annemarie. Though Shapland recognizes herself in the letters, which are intimate and unabashed in their feelings, she does not see McCullers as history has portrayed her. Her curiosity gives way to fixation, not just with this newly discovered side of McCullers's life, but with how we tell queer love stories. Why, Shapland asks, are the stories of women paved over by others' narratives? What happens when constant revision is required of queer women trying to navigate and self-actualize in straight spaces? And what might the tracing of McCullers's life--her history, her secrets, her legacy--reveal to Shapland about herself?
In smart, illuminating prose, Shapland interweaves her own story with McCullers's to create a vital new portrait of one of our nation's greatest literary treasures, and shows us how the writers we love and the stories we tell about ourselves make us who we are.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In this uneven hybrid biography/memoir debut, Shapland seeking affirmation of her own emergence as gay by combing archival materials for proof that author Carson McCullers was a lesbian. Predicated on Shapland's belief that "to tell another person's story, a writer must make that person some version of herself," she cites--in what reveals itself to be a nonlinear collection of observations--similarities between herself and her subject, overlaying "my own life as a writer, as a queer person, as a chronically ill person, to tell Carson's untold story." Many of Shapland's assumptions about McCullers are derived from transcripts of McCullers's taped therapy sessions during the late 1950s, during which she discussed her two tumultuous marriages to Reeves McCullers and her passionate female friendships. "Carson didn't feel shy about what the tapes contained--she aimed to publish them," Shapland explains, which made her feel "comfortable... parsing them for subtexts." Yet even she admits her findings are slippery: "I was a confused queer person looking to Carson as a role model... seeing what I wanted to see." In stating that biographies "are built of artifice and lies... and this is not a biography," Shapland's intermingled autobiography and biography of McCullers's life unsatisfyingly blurs what is real and what is imagined. (Feb.)
Guardian Review
This book, slight as a sapling, has its beginnings in 2016, in the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, where its author was then working as an intern. It was Jenn Shapland's job at the famous repository of writers' archives to answer scholars' queries, about half of which usually had to do with David Foster Wallace or Norman Mailer. One February morning, however, she was asked about some letters from a Swiss writer called Annemarie Schwarzenbach to Carson McCullers, the author of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. Dating from the 1940s, these notes changed everything for Shapland. Reading them through their plastic sleeves, she saw they were love letters: intimate, suggestive, unambiguous in their meaning. Shapland had not read McCullers's novels. "Books seem to find me when I'm ready for them," she writes, a statement that forewarns the reader, early on, of the Jenn-centred universe of her book. But now she was captivated - and something shifted inside her. Within a week, she had cut her hair short. Within a year, she had begun "calling myself a lesbian for the first time". Asked what she wanted to do for her second-year project at the library, she chose the personal effects collections, where she catalogued McCullers's extraordinary clothes: her embroidered vests, the nightgowns she liked to wear under a coat, a gold lamé jacket with a magenta lining that still had a Saks tag on it. Objects, she found, offered her a McCullers that she could touch, even smell. This was love. Feeling possessive, Shapland dismissed those she saw as her rivals, otherwise known as McCullers's biographers. With their genteel euphemisms ("companions", "roommates", "crushes") and their obsession with McCullers's husband, Reeves, whom the author married twice, those "burglars" had, she insisted to herself, effectively erased the writer's sexuality. It would be up to her to put the record straight. My Autobiography of Carson McCullers, as its too-clever-by-half-sounding title implies, is neither memoir nor biography. Shapland writes that it exists "in the fluid distance between the writer and her subject, in the fashioning of a self¿ on the page", which sounds exciting; Katie Roiphe's recent The Power Notebooks is on this territory and it's brilliant. In the case of Shapland, however, such a declaration cannot disguise the fact that her (over) identification with McCullers takes us nowhere that is very productive. Yes, there is her stay in the McCullers house in Columbus, Ohio, where she spends a lot of time lying in a pink bath. Yes, she reveals what she found in the transcripts of McCullers's therapy sessions with another lover, Dr Mary Mercer (though she is not permitted to quote them). There are mentions of McCullers's friends WH Auden, Gypsy Rose Lee and Tennessee Williams and of the lunch she threw in 1961 for Marilyn Monroe, Arthur Miller and author Isak Dinesen. At Yaddo, the New York writers' colony to which McCullers was also a visitor, she ponders the (almost nonexistent) connections between her subject and another of its guests, Patricia Highsmith. In the main, though, her focus is relentlessly on McCullers's sexuality and the way that women who love women often go unseen, a hangover, she says, from the "romantic friendships" of the Victorians. Shapland writes of having been in the closet herself; of her mother's cruel attempt to out her and of a "roommate" she was sleeping with. She wants to name lesbians - to use the word, over and over - not only as a point of principle, but because it does her such good. I understand this. But there is a problem here. In all the pointing, McCullers's work is lost; Shapland is keen on the novels' queerness, but never gets too involved with their literary achievements. Like many of the other women in the book, she is seen almost entirely through the prism of her sexuality (Tove Jansson, the creator of the Moomins, is "the Finnish lesbian cartoonist"; Betty Parsons, supporter of Jackson Pollock and Robert Rauschenberg, is "the lesbian gallerist"). How reductive this is and how antiquated. It's a diminishment that invites another kind of invisibility and I think McCullers (and all of them) would have despised it. Still, I'm glad to have read My Autobiography of Carson McCullers. Its mere existence stands as a warning of the cul-de-sac into which publishing has lately wandered (I mean, run, blindfolded, at full tilt). It could not be more modish, from the floating paragraphs of its fractured narrative to its breathless quoting of Maggie Nelson (of whom, incidentally, I'm a fan). In the US, it was a National Book award finalist; Carmen Maria Machado calls it - preposterously, given the single note it sounds - "symphonic". Why the dazzlement? Why won't anyone take this book on? Because I'm here to tell you that it often makes no sense. "For me, Carson's words are her words," writes Shapland, a tautologous statement that's fairly typical for its assertion of something with which it's impossible to disagree. In thrall to a certain kind of identity politics, she urges us to understand queer, outsider lives. Yet the whole thrust of her writing here - its engine and its soul - is that we cannot hope to understand a life unless it belongs to someone whose identity is exactly the same as our own. What's funny about this is that before I read Shapland's book, I'd no idea anyone believed McCullers was straight. What's much less funny is its utter futility. What a dead end. For writing, for the imagination, for empathy.
Kirkus Review
An intimate look at the life and loves of Carson McCullers (1917-1967)."To tell another person's story," Shapland observes in her deft, graceful literary debut, "a writer must make that person some version of herself, must find a way to inhabit her." The author knew little about McCullers before she became an intern at the Harry Ransom Center, a repository for writers' and artists' archives at the University of Texas. Responding to a scholar's request, she discovered eight letters from Swiss writer and photographer Annemarie Schwarzenbach to McCullers that struck Shapland immediately as "intimate, suggestive" love letters. For Shapland, at the time suffering the end of a "major, slow-burning catastrophe," the letters marked a "turning point." Within a week, she cut her hair short. "Within a year," she writes, "I would be more or less comfortably calling myself a lesbian for the first time." The letters inspired further research, focused especially on McCullers' sexuality, about which Shapland found intriguing evidence in transcripts of her taped therapy sessions with Dr. Mary Mercer, begun when McCullers was 41 and which McCullers described "as an attempt of writing her autobiography." In addition, following the sessions, McCullers wrote letters to Mercer "awash in the joy of self-revelation" and her "love for Dr. Mary." The more Shapland discovered about McCullers, the more convinced she became that McCullers was a lesbian who had been intensely in love with several women. Identifying with McCullers "as a writer, as a queer person, as a chronically ill person," Shapland felt she had special insight into her subject's life. At the same time, looking to McCullers "as a role model," she wondered if she was "reading into her queerness": imposing her own life story, and her own needs, on McCullers, in part to rescue her from "retroactive closeting by peers and biographers." Shapland interweaves candid self-questioning and revealing personal stories with a nuanced portrait of a writer who confessed her loves were "untouchable" and her feelings "inarticulable."A sensitive chronicle of a biographer's search for truth. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Interning in the archives of the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, Shapland followed a scholar's query to a trove of letters between novelist Carson McCullers (1917-67) and Swiss artist Annemarie Clarac-Schwarzenbach: ""I wasn't expecting love letters."" This memoir, a creative blend of probing research and emotional discoveries, including self-discovery, grew from a resulting obsession to balance the biographical record of McCullers, which generally euphemizes or casts outright doubt on her love for women. Shapland, who endured a painfully closeted relationship before fully coming into her own queer identity, finds in McCullers ""a familiarly protracted becoming."" She mines McCullers' correspondence, transcripts of her therapy sessions (which were at one point intended to become her autobiography), and other personal effects and even lives for a month in McCullers' childhood home. She discovers a woman who deeply loved other women while lacking the terms and perhaps the space to define her queer desire. Celebrating McCullers, love, and the idea that every story told includes something of its teller, Shapland writes an involving literary journey of the self.--Annie Bostrom Copyright 2020 Booklist
Library Journal Review
Mixing memoir, criticism, and biography, Pushcart Prize winner Shapland (creative writing, Inst. of American Indian Arts, Santa Fe, NM) intertwines deep research and her own quest for love into a comprehensive examination of the life and work of American novelist and short story writer Carson McCullers (1917--67). As an intern at the University of Texas at Austin's Harry Ransom Center, Shapland discovered McCullers's personal letters and was later invited to stay at the writer's home, thus began her journey toward understanding an author she'd long admired on a more intimate level. Shapland relates how parsing McCullers's work (e.g., The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter) has allowed her to articulate her own identity and explores how queer love stories are shaped and told. Along the way, Shapland defines what is means to her to be a queer woman and the truths she wishes to tell about her own life, drawing on examples from her own work. VERDICT A fine narrative of how the best writers express the deepest secrets of the heart.--Pam Kingsbury, Univ. of North Alabama, Florence
Table of Contents
Author's Note | p. xv |
Question | p. 1 |
Articulation | p. 3 |
Correspondence | p. 5 |
The Soul's Particular Territories | p. 12 |
Derangement, or Why I Write | p. 19 |
Caves | p. 24 |
Chick-fil-A | p. 28 |
Tree Houses and Telephone Booths | p. 30 |
That Girl | p. 35 |
Qualifications | p. 38 |
A Free Love | p. 45 |
Windows | p. 51 |
Unforeseen Events | p. 54 |
Becomings | p. 60 |
February House | p. 67 |
Imaginary Friends | p. 70 |
Prove It on Me Blues | p. 76 |
Dedications | p. 81 |
Ambivalences | p. 85 |
Convalescence | p. 90 |
Parasites | p. 94 |
Homebodies | p. 95 |
Rules | p. 97 |
My Rainbow Youth | p. 98 |
Portals | p. 106 |
Item 8 | p. 107 |
Items 42-45 | p. 108 |
Items Unlocated | p. 109 |
Womanish | p. 110 |
On Exposure | p. 116 |
Conflation | p. 120 |
The Hunt | p. 121 |
Semantics | p. 124 |
Separate Bedrooms | p. 125 |
Androgyny | p. 129 |
They/Them | p. 134 |
Confidantes | p. 137 |
The High Line | p. 142 |
Threesomes | p. 146 |
Recliner | p. 150 |
Ontological Destabilization | p. 155 |
Googling | p. 159 |
Preaching | p. 161 |
List of Carson's Possible Girlfriends | p. 163 |
Other Likely Lesbians | p. 165 |
Second Marriages | p. 166 |
Dedications | p. 171 |
Fury and Disaster | p. 172 |
In Sickness | p. 175 |
Witch Hunt | p. 181 |
This Mad Desire for Travel | p. 186 |
Going West | p. 191 |
Coping Mechanisms | p. 195 |
Seismographs | p. 200 |
Diagnosis | p. 203 |
Blue Chair | p. 205 |
Organ | p. 207 |
Last Love | p. 209 |
Not Yet | p. 211 |
First Loves | p. 213 |
Dream | p. 215 |
Matters of Taste | p. 217 |
Dedications | p. 221 |
Dream | p. 222 |
Your Name | p. 223 |
Forensics | p. 227 |
Expurgation | p. 231 |
Lies, Secrets, and Silence | p. 233 |
Myth Mania | p. 235 |
Recognition | p. 240 |
The Silencing Force | p. 244 |
Proximity | p. 245 |
Myopia | p. 247 |
September 29, 1967 | p. 248 |
September 29, 2016 | p. 249 |
Love and Winter | p. 250 |
The Dead | p. 251 |
Dream | p. 252 |
Note to Self | p. 253 |
Euphemisms | p. 254 |
Acknowledgments | p. 257 |
Sources | p. 259 |