My Autobiography of Carson McCullers: A Memoir

by Jenn Shapland

To tell her own story, a writer must make herself a character.

To tell another person’s story, a writer must make that person some version of herself, must

find a way to inh...

Books seem to find me when I’m ready for them, or else I abandon them.

Like my own letters from my late teens and early twenties, Annemarie’s letters are transmissions from one confused woman to another, an attempt to articulate a self she had not yet fully become.

Retrospect redefines everything in its path, and I am as hesitant to ascribe steady narrative meaning to my own life as to any other’s.

In April 1958, she tells Mary in a letter that her writing comes to her from a place of instinct, rather than analysis, and that she only comprehends what she writes after it is finished.

Therapy has a lot in common with memoir: It’s telling your story.

me, “I seem to have lost the narrative thread of my life.” I said, “I just don’t know what the narrative is anymore.”

What I was trying to say, I think, was that I didn’t know how to talk my way through talk therapy without a story I could comprehend, a narrative logic into which I could insert my actions and my feelings.

“I was gawky and erratic and unmanageable to myself,” as Jill Johnston, author of Lesbian Nation, describes her experience of coming to terms with her identity.

What I can tell you about my experience as a fledgling lesbian is

that it took me a long time to accept and understand it, the identity, the word itself. Now I think of sexuality and identity, gender too, as processes of trial and error. You have to find what works for you. You need a narrative with room for messiness, one that can accommodate veering toward extremes.

I am more convinced than ever that we are shards of others.

In a world built by and for men and their pursuits, a woman who loves women does not register—and is not registered, i.e., written down.

It was her retroactive closeting by peers and biographers that I found most disturbing. I took it personally. I began to feel unreal, deranged. If Carson was not a lesbian, if none of these women were lesbians, according to history, if indeed there hardly is a lesbian history, do I exist?

The straight narrative is given the benefit of the doubt, and writers feel comfortable filling in the blanks to create a great and desperate love story out of what looks, on my reading, like a series of manipulations of a woman struggling to name her own desires.

There are many ways to interpret a life. But what if we choose the most probable scenario, the path of least resistance, instead of trying to talk our way out of what seems evident, instead of trying to explain away the obvious?

I became afraid that, in the very process of trying to know her, I would somehow change her.

I read an interview with Myles that offers writing, self-exposure or self-representation, as an antidote to—or an action of—loneliness: “You tell it cause you’re lonely—

you’re the only person inside that life.”

I felt an immediate connection to the small southern towns where her characters, often adolescents, strongly sense their own unbelonging and isolation.

Outsiderness is a stance.

“meeting other lesbians was very difficult,” Lorde writes in Zami.

But aren’t lesbians supposed to love sensible shoes?

we find individuals who choose to make their lives and their bodies sites for their politics and their feminism.

This ongoing suppression of details is even more troublesome given the burden of proof placed on queer relationships, both historical and present day: if it can’t be proved with direct evidence of sexual intimacy, it never happened. And if you’re looking for evidence, it won’t ever be published.

I suddenly didn’t trust myself as a reader.

a partisan of the gay agenda.

I have read enough biographies to know, in no uncertain terms, that they are built of artifice and lies. I am not a fiction writer, and this is not a biography.

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 ninetee...

began to feel that someone—several someones—had put the jigsaw puzzle together all wrong, to form a picture of Carson that didn’t match the one I recognized.

I had to take the puzzle apart and find all the faulty links. Then

I didn’t want to encounter another person who might try to put the pieces back their own way, who would tell me where the pieces go. I wanted only the pieces in her words, and time.

“I never thought ‘my Jane’ might approximate the ‘real Jane’; I never even

had designs on such a thing,” Maggie Nelson writes of her aunt, Jane Mixer,

He tells her it doesn’t matter whether or not she’s a lesbian because he loves her, and then changes the subject to setting a wedding date.

This line of reasoning, that women’s relationships with other women (especially in college) do not count as full, mature sexual experiences, continues to this day.

The stories of women are paved over by others’ narratives so often that we rarely get to hear about how things went from their perspectives, from the inside.

Constant revision is required of queer women trying to navigate and self-actualize in straight spaces.

as Janet Malcolm has it, if the biographer “is like the professional burglar, breaking into a house, rifling through certain drawers that he has good reason to think contain the jewelry and the money, and triumphantly bearing his loot away”—memoir is peeking into the windows of your own life.

A voyeurism of the self.

I am perched outside my own windows as I try to see into Carson’s.

To use her therapy transcripts as a source by which to construct Carson’s autobiography is to accept a correlation between speaking and writing.

the scraps of her story.

Who can tell the story of her own life?

It took months of testing for doctors to determine that my heart is too small, my blood volume too low, to keep my body afloat.

I’m always reading queer histories that dance elaborately around the terminology of queerness,

The effect of this, for me, is an erasure of lesbians from history.