Menu
Next in the queue
54
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
59/100Critics
50/100Scholars
Author:
Jenn Shapland
Publisher:
Tin House Books
Date:
February 4, 2020
A hybrid of memoir and biography, Jenn Shaplandâs debut is a sensitive recounting of her discovery of novelist Carson McCullers and, in a very real sense, of her own identity as a lesbian and a writer.
What The Reviewers Say
My Autobiography of Carson McCullers , as its too-clever-by-half-sounding title implies, is neither memoir nor biography.
... a hard-won inquiry into how we seek out the truth of ourselves and others in ways that often, by necessity, aren’t straightforward, that arrive in our lives in glimmering bits and shards.
Shapland’s research uncovers one censorship after another: euphemisms, silence, and outright denial by parties competing to control McCullers’ story—a willful closeting. But if one could animate this book, it’d be with the cartoon trope of the exploding closet.
...brilliantly interweaves Carson’s personal history with Shapland’s own.
