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.

What makes this such an unusual work, far removed from conventional biography, is that it’s as much Shapland’s personal story as it is McCullers’. In the process of recasting McCullers, Shapland also finds her own identity, interweaving the two stories.

... sensational.

Physical objects become a focus for Shapland’s meditation, reflection, and questions about McCullers’s life and essence. They pull McCullers from the past into a present mediated by Shapland’s storytelling. Some of Shapland’s best writing focuses on extricating broader meaning from these tangible objects.

This fragmented construction (the book is split into 80 short fragments, or 'chapters') isn’t simply an aesthetic choice; it also works as a crucial comment on the genre of women’s life narratives and the construction of self.

... [a] spare but impassioned memoir.

Though her book is composed of vignettes that read like entries in an archive...Shapland is led more by feeling and response.

Shapland is meticulous and shines when she loses herself in her material. Her project of proof-finding defies the historical trend of demanding explicit records of sexual encounters to even acknowledge a woman’s queerness in favor of a stranger, more personal methodology: embodiment..

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.

...an exquisitely rendered map of discovery–of an icon, and of a self. It asks, with humor and tenderness, who gets to tell the story of their life? How do we understand each other’s stories? And is everyone queer? (Answer: yes)..

'What is the precise evidence for love?' Shapland asks in her stunning, full-length nonfiction debut...Throughout her riveting and tender investigation into this question, Shapland travels the country chasing down letters, photographs, and objects in order to uncover the truth about the love life of an oft-overlooked titan of American fiction.

Shapland does so much more than define this relationship and retell the author’s life story; she questions the reasons for her intense reaction and articulates harmful shortcomings, not only in Carson McCullers’s biography, but literary history in general: a persistent refusal to tell queer women’s narratives, by downplaying or, worse, omitting desire and relationships between women. In this brilliant debut, Shapland brings the reader along on a quest through libraries and literature and writing communities, as she explores her understanding of Carson’s life as a queer narrative and, most significantly, as a literary, historic narrative in relation to her own queer identity.

My Autobiography of Carson McCullers is structured...in a way that feels conversational. Sensitive to the false narratives biographers sometimes impose, Shapland tries to avoid clichés, in particular the idea that McCullers’ relationships with women were insignificant compared to her 'tortured' relationship with Reeves McCullers, whom she married at nineteen, divorced, and remarried.

If McCullers provided salvation, helping Shapland emerge once and for all from the closet, now the younger writer has an opportunity to return the favor. But she is wary.

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..

...[a] deft, graceful literary debut.