My Autobiography of Carson McCullers: A Memoir

by Jenn Shapland

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.”

It takes a great deal of courtesy and ability to see and love the difference, the separateness of the other.

When I read Carson’s fiction, it is clear that empathy is a choice a person makes, moment to moment, in how they approach other people.

Love meanwhile lives in the mundane, the moment-to-moment exchanges, and can so easily become invisible after the people who shared it are no longer alive. But, of course, it leaves traces.

But the dead are the dead. Presumably they have finished with wanting.”