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.

On each day of my two years at the center, I came into the shared intern office and answered queries from scholars about their research from a stack of mail by the door. Most were boring. About half of them were about either David Foster Wallace or Norman Mailer. (My favorite find was a series of letters one of Mailer’s mistresses had written him with the salutation—summing up my own feelings—Dear American Shithead.)

It is by no means easy to track or trace relationships between women, past or present. Women’s relationships with other women are often disguised: by well-documented marriages to men, by a cultural refusal to see what is in full view or even to believe such relationships exist. In a world built by and for men and their pursuits, a woman who loves women does not register—and is not registered, i.e., written down.

The stories of women are paved over by others’ narratives so often that we rarely get to hear about how things went from their perspectives, from the inside.

Historians demand proof from queer love stories that they never require of straight relationships. Unless someone was in the room when the two women had sex (and just what “sex” means between women is, for many historians, up for debate), there’s just no reason to include in the historical record that they were lesbians. At least that’s what it seems like to me.

I learned that I love that blur, the murk, the shift that androgyny in appearance allows, not as a means of escape from one label or another, but rather as a means of occupation. I occupy the category woman, and that category must expand to contain me. In all my outfits.

A few days later, before I got in touch with Myles, I got an email from someone on the book-fest staff informing me that “Eileen goes by the pronoun ‘they.’” This was news to me: the person who claimed to have run the first “openly female” campaign for president in 1992 was going by “they”? I even went so far as to let this bother me for a moment. My lesbian hero disidentifying from womanhood? How could I process this? But then the real concern blossomed: I had to be on stage with Myles in a few weeks and I could not fuck this up. On the phone with Chelsea and my friends, freaking out, we tried to practice using “they,” but no one was successful every time. “She”s just slipped out.

I asked them what it means to be queer in being and in writing. I was too nervous to remember their exact words, but Myles answered something along the lines of constant shifting, the ever new. This part I do remember. Eileen: “I’ve earned better words than ‘Miss.’”

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.

It can be lonely to be queer, especially if you choose to forego the usual signposts of a complete life, like marriage and children. And it is lonely to be a writer, to put your work first and your income second in a world that would rather you find a full-time job and earn more money.