Jenn Shapland
Author of My Autobiography of Carson McCullers: A Memoir
Works by Jenn Shapland
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- Jenn Shapland is a writer and archivist living in New Mexico. Her first book, My Autobiography of Carson McCullers, was a finalist for the 2020 National Book Award and the Southern Book Prize, and won the 2021 Lambda Literary Award, the Publishing Triangle Judy Grahn Award, and the Phi Beta Kappa Christian Gauss Award. Shapland has a PhD in English from the University of Texas at Austin, where her dissertation, Narrative Salvage, focused on wastescapes in contemporary literature. She currently works as an archivist for a visual artist.
Her second book, Thin Skin, will be published by Pantheon Books. Her essays have appeared in New England Review, the New York Times, Outside, Guernica, and Tin House. Her research and writing have been supported by residencies at Yaddo, Ucross, and Vermont Studio Center and by fellowships from the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum and the Howard Foundation. - Nationality
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This remarkable book takes the now fairly common narrative structure of combining a non-fiction subject with the author's own memoir and uses it to do some very interesting things. Shapland began as a research librarian doing things cataloging donations from author's estates and sending copies of documents to scholars. It's then that she discovers some letters written to McCullers, love letters that were written by a Swiss woman, and that eventually leads to this book.
McCullers lived at a show more time when people were not able to be openly gay, and even less so in the small, Southern town where she grew up. So it's not surprising that she lacked the vocabulary to talk about this, but it is surprising that none of her previous biographers mentioned it, at best hinting of ambivalence. As Shapland finds more and more evidence, she begins researching seriously, culminating with a month-long residency in McCullers's own family home in Columbus, Georgia. McCullers dealt with feeling like an outsider even within the community she was born in; her health was poor and she was often unable to get out of bed, she didn't fit comfortably into the role of a Southern belle, leaving for New York while still a teenager. Married early, she leaves her marriage for the comforts of February House, a place filled with artists and writers like W.H. Auden, Jane and Paul Bowles and Gypsy Rose Lee and then a residency at the famous artists's enclave of Yaddo. Throughout she struggled with her sexuality, marrying and remarrying the same man, who Shapland contends was controlling and using her fame, but others have portrayed Reeves as protective. She struggled with her health and how difficult it often was for her to do any work.
A lot of people talk about Carson McCullers as "ahead of her time," given, I presume, her empathetic writing about gay men, interracial love, racism, and disability in the 1940s and '50s. . . but perhaps, it feels more accurate to say that she was just plain empathetic to human differences. That it has nothing to do with history, with "the times," with generation. 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.
Shapland uses the parallels between her own life and McCullers's as scaffolding, and then moves from that into asking if it's possible to write biography without bias. From McCullers's previous biographers refusal to look at what was in front of them to her own focus on McCullers's sexuality, she contends that it's impossible for any person to write about another without introducing their own bias, from what they choose to focus on to what they omit. By putting her own motivations front and center of this book, I was sent looking for articles about specific aspects of McCullers's life alongside this book and in doing so, it was interesting to suddenly spot how the authors of those articles were choosing how they wrote about her and to realize that it would be impossible to do otherwise.
I can see why this book was a finalist for the National Book Award. This thought-provoking and personal book is well worth reading and I suspect I will be thinking about different parts of it for some time to come. show less
McCullers lived at a show more time when people were not able to be openly gay, and even less so in the small, Southern town where she grew up. So it's not surprising that she lacked the vocabulary to talk about this, but it is surprising that none of her previous biographers mentioned it, at best hinting of ambivalence. As Shapland finds more and more evidence, she begins researching seriously, culminating with a month-long residency in McCullers's own family home in Columbus, Georgia. McCullers dealt with feeling like an outsider even within the community she was born in; her health was poor and she was often unable to get out of bed, she didn't fit comfortably into the role of a Southern belle, leaving for New York while still a teenager. Married early, she leaves her marriage for the comforts of February House, a place filled with artists and writers like W.H. Auden, Jane and Paul Bowles and Gypsy Rose Lee and then a residency at the famous artists's enclave of Yaddo. Throughout she struggled with her sexuality, marrying and remarrying the same man, who Shapland contends was controlling and using her fame, but others have portrayed Reeves as protective. She struggled with her health and how difficult it often was for her to do any work.
A lot of people talk about Carson McCullers as "ahead of her time," given, I presume, her empathetic writing about gay men, interracial love, racism, and disability in the 1940s and '50s. . . but perhaps, it feels more accurate to say that she was just plain empathetic to human differences. That it has nothing to do with history, with "the times," with generation. 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.
Shapland uses the parallels between her own life and McCullers's as scaffolding, and then moves from that into asking if it's possible to write biography without bias. From McCullers's previous biographers refusal to look at what was in front of them to her own focus on McCullers's sexuality, she contends that it's impossible for any person to write about another without introducing their own bias, from what they choose to focus on to what they omit. By putting her own motivations front and center of this book, I was sent looking for articles about specific aspects of McCullers's life alongside this book and in doing so, it was interesting to suddenly spot how the authors of those articles were choosing how they wrote about her and to realize that it would be impossible to do otherwise.
I can see why this book was a finalist for the National Book Award. This thought-provoking and personal book is well worth reading and I suspect I will be thinking about different parts of it for some time to come. show less
I kind of love the stuffing out of this book. Shapland has written an intimate book that is like the story of Carson McCullers and the story of Jenn Shapland wresting with the issues that come up for her as she tells us about McCullers' life. Shapland's voice is engaging and clear, and there is something about reading about her experience of learning about McCullers that brought McCullers closer for me and also brought me into Shapland's world. IDK, it was a very circular experience for me show more and very rewarding. Definitely for the fan of Carson McCullers though- the reader who said you need to know something about her is absolutely correct. And it makes me want to read or re-read all of McCullers' books. show less
I really loved this book. It’s a heartfelt and interesting exploration of the ways we interpret history, our own and others. It really gets one questioning whether it’s even possible to tell an accurate story about a person’s life based on “evidence” when there is so much that gets lost or intentionally omitted. I really connected with the author’s ambivalence toward the project of biography and the frustration with the tendency to fall back into a heteronormative narrative, even show more when it makes less sense to do so. The nonlinear approach was really interesting and I liked how the structure included sections that were quite short, but packed a punch. I also added so many things to my “to-read” list that I wouldn’t have found otherwise.
Would definitely recommend for people interested in literary memoirs and queer history show less
Would definitely recommend for people interested in literary memoirs and queer history show less
If you peek under the dust jacket of the hardcover edition of Jenn Shapland’s My Autobiography of Carson McCullers, you will see the initials “CM” and “JS” arranged as if on a shield. Shapland has taken on the task of defending the frail, long deceased author from those who would deny her true nature.
As a grad student Shapland examines new archival material related to Carson McCullers, including transcripts of her therapy sessions, and concludes that the author of the Heart Is a show more Lonely Hunter was "queer" (Shapland’s word) and was definitely a lesbian, even if she didn't use those labels herself. This is in contrast to prior biographers of McCullers, who claimed that she was heterosexual or asexual, even though she was given to passionate crushes on glamorous women.
When she's not discussing McCullers's closeted lesbianism, Shapland writes about her own experiences as a child of privilege and grad student with a travel budget. She stays at sites associated with McCullers, such as the author's childhood home in Columbus, Georgia, and the arts colony at Yaddo, New York. Shapland also shares observations about her own life and sexuality.
If you haven't read about McCullers before, you are likely to find this book hard to follow, since Shapland assumes the reader already has a familiarity with the author's life. For those who do, however, this is a quick, entertaining read that sheds new light on an often misunderstood figure. show less
As a grad student Shapland examines new archival material related to Carson McCullers, including transcripts of her therapy sessions, and concludes that the author of the Heart Is a show more Lonely Hunter was "queer" (Shapland’s word) and was definitely a lesbian, even if she didn't use those labels herself. This is in contrast to prior biographers of McCullers, who claimed that she was heterosexual or asexual, even though she was given to passionate crushes on glamorous women.
When she's not discussing McCullers's closeted lesbianism, Shapland writes about her own experiences as a child of privilege and grad student with a travel budget. She stays at sites associated with McCullers, such as the author's childhood home in Columbus, Georgia, and the arts colony at Yaddo, New York. Shapland also shares observations about her own life and sexuality.
If you haven't read about McCullers before, you are likely to find this book hard to follow, since Shapland assumes the reader already has a familiarity with the author's life. For those who do, however, this is a quick, entertaining read that sheds new light on an often misunderstood figure. show less
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