My Autobiography of Carson McCullers: A Memoir

by Jenn Shapland

The Columbus Public Library had asked Carson for her papers in 1961, and she replied that she would send them only if

the library desegregated. They refused, and her papers went to Texas.

Historians demand proof from queer love stories that they never require of straight relationships.

history does not progress, does not move forward, cannot be understood as some sort of trajectory we can draw between past and future that goes through the present.

she was just plain empathetic to human differences. That it has nothing to do with history, with “the times,” with generation.

empathy is a choice a person makes, moment to moment, in how they approach other people. On the page and off.

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.

Love must be public, shared. If you keep it to yourself, it doesn’t really exist; it has no practical use in the world.