My Autobiography of Carson McCullers: A Memoir

by Jenn Shapland

All of these artifacts of Carson’s life, fragmentary though they may be—her photos, her clothing, her paralyzed arm that she hid or did not hide, her will, her letters—can also be seen as a memoir.

And now suddenly I have no choice but to face the possibility that this moment is no different from Carson’s 1950s or Emily’s 1860s or Harmony’s 1970s, that history recurs or continues to be the same conversation, the same story, with the same limits, revised according to one’s political views.

I’m drawn to Carson’s story and to her fictions of growing up in places that feel cut off, isolated, conservative compared to some other world out there that one can’t quite access.

For this same reason, it is difficult to chart the illness of a historical figure in relation to illness today. Illness is both culturally constructed and subjective. It is both within and without, felt in our bodies but filtered by the faulty language we have been given to describe

Perhaps it comes down to matters of taste whether we are interested in the later years of a woman writer’s life, whether we are interested in what she has to say when she is bedridden and wheelchair-bound, when she has to take heartburn medication to cope with the stress of a book deal. She was forty-four when the book came out and would not make it past fifty.

And unlike so many other biographies I’ve read, it feels true to life. Not true, whatever that means. But it does justice to the strangeness of memory, the unpredictability of human relationships,