My Autobiography of Carson McCullers: A Memoir

by Jenn Shapland

Carson may not have ultimately seen a book in them, but I do. I see the only story she ever wrote: a lonely misfit wrestles with her hidden self, unable to articulate her own longings.

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?

Carson’s autobiography doesn’t include many of the usual details about school or friendships with peers, but she talks about food a lot. And she talks about music. “My childhood was not lonely,” she writes in Illumination, “because when I was five years old in 1922, my Daddy bought a piano.”

Mick Kelly in The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter, loves music, listens outside window to neighbors’ radio; dreams of learning to play piano