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 inhabit her. This book takes place in the fluid distance between the writer and her subject, in the fashioning of a self, in all its permutations, on the page.

There are so many crushes in a lifetime, so many friendships that mix desiring-to-have with wanting-to-be. It’s the combination of wants that makes these longings confusing, dangerous, and queer. There is a desire to know that is already knowing, a curiosity for what you deep down recognize, a lust for what you are or could be. Writer Richard Lawson describes it as “the muddied confusion over whether you want to be someone’s companion or if you want to step inside their skin, to inhabit the world as they do.”

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?

“We know that they were lesbians because this is the best explanation of their lives. . . . The standard of visibility is not a universal prerequisite for knowledge. We cannot see electricity but we know that electricity exists because electricity is the best explanation of why moving a light switch leads to the illumination of a light bulb.”

The easy joke here: But aren’t lesbians supposed to love sensible shoes? However, if we stop short of making lesbians a joke for once, and take them seriously as people, as women, we find individuals who choose to make their lives and their bodies sites for their politics and their feminism. I would like to celebrate this choice by finding its every nuance and expression.

The illusion: feeling understood by someone does not equate to understanding them. But the illusion is powerful, convincing. It is rare to recognize when you are under its sway.

Carson’s mom so badly didn’t want her to wear glasses that she whispered the exam letters to her at the eye doctor.

I’ve started making my own clothes in the years since I began this project, frustrated that clothes in stores don’t really look or fit or feel the way I want to look and feel. Which is: not masculine, not feminine, but a both that becomes 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. On the page and off.

“You stand at the threshold of really coming into your own, and I would say it’s about time.”

To her husband, whom she married twice, Carson called her woman lovers “imaginary friends.” Her biographers called them traveling companions, good friends, roommates, close friends, dear friends, obsessions, crushes, special friends. I’m over it. I, for one, am weary of the refusal to acknowledge what is plainly obvious, plainly wonderful. Call it love.