The Desire for Recognition, Jenn Shapland and Carson McCullers

The titles of Carson McCullers’s books had always struck a chord with me. The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. Like, same. But I’d never gotten around to reading any of her work. Books seem to find me when I’m ready for them. Hers didn’t until the second year of my PhD program, when I was an intern at the Harry Ransom Center, which houses a giant collection of writers’ and artists’ books, papers, photographs, and artworks at the University of Texas at Austin

One day, a scholar wrote asking for letters between McCullers and Annemarie Clarac-Schwarzenbach, whose name was utterly unfamiliar to me. I took the freight elevator to the icy basement manuscript room, pulled the correspondence folder—it was labeled 29.4, I still recall—and started reading it right there in the stacks.

The paper was browned with age and wrinkled at the edges. Annemarie’s handwriting filled the page, which I read through the clear Mylar sleeves: “Carson, child, my beloved, you know that, leaving the day after tomorrow, feeling half-afraid and proud, leaving behind me all I care for, once again, and a wave of love—”

I looked up at the rows of manuscript boxes that surrounded me, mind humming, face flushed. “Love”—did that mean what I thought it did? Instinctively, I listened for anyone who might be coming. Hearing only the ticktick of the sliding electric shelves, I read on. To Carson, Annemarie recalled “talking as we did, you and I, at that lunch time, you remember, at the corner near the Bedford Hotel, with milk and bread and butter, ages ago.”

Annemarie’s language in her letters to Carson was intimate, suggestive, or at least I read it that way. You remember. I had received letters like these. I had written letters like these to women I’d loved. Letters with words like darling and baby. Another thing I recognized: The intimacy of Annemarie’s tone contained a hint of plausible deniability, as though the “wave of love” she referred to might not have been about Carson at all.

It was very little to go on, and yet I felt utter certainty: Carson McCullers had loved women. Or at least this woman had loved her. I wanted to know everything about them both. I brought the folder upstairs, hurried to my 3 o’clock reference desk shift, and started Googling. Annemarie, I discovered, was a Swiss writer, photographer, silk heiress, and known lady-killer who spent time in New York in the late 1930s and early ’40s, but there wasn’t much else.

Folder 29.4 held eight letters from Annemarie to Carson, but none of Carson’s replies. One had the heading “On the Congo River, Sept. 1941.” Annemarie’s handwriting was so small and insistent that the missives read long, though often they covered only the front and back of a single sheet. Like mine, they were overwrought, wrung with feeling and a need to declare it in writing. Other than my own, I had never read love letters between women before.

I found the letters at the tail end of the slow-burning catastrophe of my 20s: never quite breaking up with my first love—a woman I’d met our freshman year of college—after six closeted years together.

I didn’t know whether I wanted to date women, but on the heels of emotional and sexual manipulation by a male professor, the idea of dating men seemed pretty dismal. Like most 25-year-olds, I couldn’t figure out what came next.

What came next was Carson. I tried to tell a few people about the letters, but I couldn’t explain why they were so significant to me. “She dated a woman,” they’d say. “So?”

The years that followed were overtaken by my desire to understand the magnitude of Carson and Annemarie’s on-paper love. And to understand myself, too. I didn’t realize I was starting a book that would take me seven years to research and write. Within a week of finding the letters, without seeing any connection to the photos of Annemarie I’d been Googling, I would chop my hair short. Within a year, I would be calling myself a lesbian for the first time—albeit only privately, in my mind and to a few close friends. Having grown up Catholic in the Midwest, I struggled to claim my own sexuality. I was still trying it out, working to get the word out of my mouth.

Four years later, I would live in Carson’s childhood home for a month on a research fellowship, and soon after I would move to Santa Fe with my new love, Chelsea—we met as interns—abandoning my academic job search to finish a book about Carson. Retrospect redefines everything in its path, and I am as hesitant to ascribe fixed narrative meaning to my own life as any other. But I suppose we could call those letters a turning point.

Finding Carson McCullers' Secret Love Letters Helped Me Realize Who I Am. By Jenn Shapland.

Oprah Magazine, December  20, 2019. 

I came to Carson first through her love letters, and then through her clothes. As an intern at the Ransom Center, a vault of books and manuscripts, I was given a choice of second-year projects. Anything I wanted to work on, any collection that needed cataloging, any exhibition in the works could have been my focus. After a year of detouring to push my library cart down aisles of typewriters, eyeglasses, and most amazingly—clothes every time I was on the seventh floor, I knew that I wanted to work on the personal effects collections. I was assigned the clothing, objects, and miscellaneous housewares of four writers: Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and Carson McCullers. Before this project, I hadn’t thought all that much about an author’s clothes. But in my hours with random assortments of garments—socks, suits, coats, hats, and vests—I became more convinced of their potential for communing with lives past.

Since I’d unearthed Annemarie’s letters and realized how insignificantly she came off in Carson’s public story, I began to cling to Carson’s mentions of places and objects for clues to who she was. Her clothes, her knickknacks, offered something I came to see as more truthful: the honesty of objects. Description can only expose so much of the self or contain so much of a memory or an experience. Photos and objects offer alternative access points to Carson’s history of identity formation and love. When I first reached for these objects, trying to understand Carson’s story, I was reaching for an embodied history, a past I could touch.

Carson’s focus on clothes in her therapy sessions and in Illumination reveals their importance to her, which I intuited while I catalogued them. Clothes gave her a way to express an identity that was fluid, a way to change who she was to the world each day. In April 1958, Carson laments to Mary her long lost status as an “it girl,” wistful for her former stylishness. In her more elegant days, she wore what she called costumes made by a friend, Joyce Davis, and her girlfriends were the most attractive around. At bars like the Blue Angel, the 21 Club, and Alice’s Candle, they gallivanted in box-pleated skirts and knee-high socks and peacoats. Named for the 1930 Marlene Dietrich film, the Blue Angel was a cabaret in Manhattan where Barbra Streisand would later perform. Carson mentions someone by the name of Crawford, but the first name is blank. Joan? I marvel. In her years in New York, when she lived on and off at February House, Carson spent her time with queer writers and tastemakers in bars and cabarets all over town. This joyful memory is undercut by “Annamarie and her agony, you know, and Gypsy, and Annette.” The drama of her twenties.

When I catalogued Carson’s clothes, I took them off the hangers or out of their boxes and laid them out on a piece of muslin on a large table. And then, for longer than I’d ever done with my own clothes, I studied them. I looked and looked: for tags and labels, any kind of brand or designer identification, fabric contents. I looked at their linings, scanned them inch by inch for tears, stains, and signs of wear—each a communication from its wearer in a previous life. I measured and photographed each piece from several angles, never very satisfied with my ability to recreate the life I saw and felt in the clothes. If librarians and archivists are eminently mockable for their obsession with the smell of books, I can profess that clothes are much more fragrant than paper.

Traces of perfumes, soaps, mothballs, body odors. From the clothes I want to say I knew what Carson smelled like, but how could I ever describe it in words? I ran my gloved hands over the rich tweed skirtsuit in teal that looks like something she’d wear to meetings in New York with her publishers. Her long, pale lime-green wool A-line coat appears to be lined in emerald silk, but it is more likely polyester. She has several elaborately embroidered jackets and vests, things worn to theater and film premieres. Certainly Carson was never one for gowns. One item seems especially out of place, out of character: a gold lamé jacket with magenta lining that still has the Saks price tags on it, from all those years ago. It is the only item in the collection that looks unworn. Perhaps it was a gift.

The clothes in Carson’s collection consist mostly of long coats, vests, and nightgowns, which, when I first encountered them, I didn’t understand at all. Why would someone donate four cotton nightgowns to an archive? In a number of photographs, she wears the long red wool coat with embroidered gold trim, a garment with which I am deeply familiar. She called it her Russian coat, I think because it made her feel somehow “Russian,” which could mean, knowing Carson’s lifelong fascination with snowy climates, a person from a cold place. But it could just as easily suggest a person with a deep understanding of Anna Karenina. Carson refers frequently to Russian writers in her letters. I photographed the red coat from a ladder, I described it in metadata, I housed it in tissue and a box all its own. Like the clothes of our loved ones do, the coat began to resemble Carson, to signify a part of her. Years into this tunnel of research, I’ve solved the mystery of the collection of nightgowns and coats: she was a sick person. She wore, predominately, nightgowns, and often put a beautiful coat over them in photos. An interview with Rex Reed from 1967 describes how “she greets her guests in long white nightgowns and tennis shoes.”

Carson revisits memories of her appearance, her elegance, in Illumination. Her friend in the last decade of her life, a French woman named Marielle Bancou, whom Carson met on the bus from Nyack to New York, designed and made all of her “nightgowns and dressing robes,” allowing her to be bedridden in style. If these were the nightgowns I catalogued, they are lightweight cotton in pale yellow, blue, and white, with simple lace collars, occasionally with ruffled sleeves. Some short sleeved, some long sleeved, one sleeveless. They have a childlike quality, something I may have worn to sleep in the summer when I was little. She writes about a gift she received from Dawn Langley Simmons, a close friend whom she met while visiting Edwin and John. Simmons gave Carson “one of her robes, a beautiful Japanese garment which I wear often. I love Japanese and Chinese robes and wear them on all state occasions. I have one, given to me by my cousin Jordan Massee, which is 2,000 years old. It was worn in the old days on protocol visits to the dowager empress, and handed down from one generation to the next.”

The age of this robe is the only lie I feel certain of in her autobiography. Having recently catalogued clothing only a few decades old, I’m highly skeptical that any fabric would remain intact that long unless elaborate preservation techniques were employed.

In Columbus, in the office of the Stark Avenue house, a silk kimono hung on a dressmaker’s dummy under a sheet of plastic, and the director told me that this was the kimono she alleged to be 2000 years old. The first thing I did after I was left alone in the house was remove this plastic. It is a dark, rosy pink, almost purple, embroidered all over with blue, pink, and green flowers and leaves. The wide beaded, embroidered lapel circles the collar, crosses, and closes at the side of the neck. I can see how wearing the garment on state occasions would make me feel distinguished, vaguely ancient. I had brought my sewing machine with me to Columbus, with coincidental plans to make a kimono, and this served as perfect inspiration. After uncovering the kimono, I opened the heavy, yellowing floral curtains, sat down at the massive desk, and looked across the room at the garment, at my own face in the mirror hanging beside it.

A year prior, surrounded, for the first time, by artists and writers at a residency in Vermont, I took to wearing a long black silk robe with magenta polka dots over my clothes every day. I had found it at a thrift store in Burlington. It was April 2015, and I’d driven from full Texas summer blue through midatlantic spring fog to a frozen, still snowing Vermont sky. The river outside my studio window slowly thawed over the course of the month, and by the end what had been solid ice was audibly rushing with snowmelt. In my first attempt to occupy the position of “writer” in public for any extended period of time, I felt the need to don what I deemed full writer drag: my robe, my knit hat, and my duck boots preceding any version of me, any writing at all, as I swept into and out of the dining room each day.

Toward the end of my stay in Vermont I sat in my robe at the desk in my studio surrounded by photos of McCullers’s clothes that I had catalogued and all the photos of Annemarie I’d printed, a serial killer’s lair. I pulled up the first draft of this book, which consisted of questions for the objects I’d catalogued, on my laptop so those who wanted to could read it on their tour around the writers’ studios. I don’t imagine anyone did. Writers’ studios tend to be much less exciting than artists’: no paint or clay, no half-assembled sculptures midroom, just a hard drive, maybe a notebook. A closed process. But this was my first studio, my first designated, if temporary, writing space, and I had papered the walls with lines I had written, one-sentence essays in india ink on paper.

I was sipping a plastic cup of red wine (having consumed half my bottle of bourbon the first night, at the bonfire, pouring it into a camping mug and continuing to drink because that’s what I assumed a writer was supposed to do at a bonfire—What Would Carson Do?—and the next day, my first day to work, I was so ill I did nothing but sit in my studio’s armchair in the fetal position, periodically spilling down the hall to throw up in the bathroom beside some poor poet’s studio. I still don’t know how those alcoholic writers do it). One of the older men in residence, a photographer with shoulder-length gray hair, came by my studio while I sat at my desk. He said he wanted to take my picture. He said it was for his wife, so she could see what I was wearing, I think to make it less weird that he was a man alone in a room with me taking my picture. I let him. It is one of those pictures of a writer at her desk, ones we see when Google Images searching for any writer, but I have never seen mine.

 The desk in the Stark Avenue house’s office was not Carson’s, and in fact I find it odd that I have never seen mention of her desk. I think this one might have been Rita’s at some point. Early on, Carson had several author photos taken sitting at—more often sitting on—a desk, usually out on the porch. Each piece of furniture that peoples the house in Columbus tells a story of its own: the white slipcovered couch where she wrote Clock Without Hands, her beloved blue armchair, the organ. When I picture Carson writing, I picture her reclined, looking out a window.

From My Autobiography of Carson McCullers by Jenn Shapland.

Cataloguing Carson McCullers’ Clothes: Long Coats, Vests, and Gender Fluidity. By Jenn Shapland. LitHub,  February 18, 2020.

Jenn Shapland is the author of My Autobiography of Carson McCullers (Tin House Books), a Winter Spring 2020 Indies Introduce adult debut and a February 2020 Indie Next List pick.

“Shapland’s book intertwines her experience of archiving Carson McCullers’ personal effects with a fresh understanding of McCullers’ life as a lesbian through the deep examination of therapy transcripts, love letters, and a residency in McCullers’ childhood home filled with her everyday household objects,” said Mimi Hannan of La Playa Books in San Diego, California, who served on the bookseller panel that selected Shapland’s debut for the Indies Introduce program.

Hannan continued, “Shapland’s work closes the gap between researcher and subject and lays bare the bias inherent in any biography. The book’s vignettes alternate between McCullers’ life and Shapland’s, creating the sensation of peeking in the window at moments in both women’s lives and coming away with a deeper knowledge of McCullers through her effect on Shapland.”

Shapland’s nonfiction has been published in O, the Oprah Magazine; Tin House; Outside ​online; The Lifted Brow; Electric Literature; and elsewhere. Her essay “Finders, Keepers” won a 2017 Pushcart Prize, and she was awarded the 2019 Rabkin Foundation Award for art journalism for “Thirteen Ways of Moving to the Desert” and “Field Report: El Paso + Juárez.” She has a PhD in English from the University of Texas at Austin and lives in New Mexico.

Here, Hannan asks Shapland about her debut.

Mimi Hannan: I’m neither queer nor have I read any Carson McCullers, but I absolutely loved this book. Bringing your story into the biography, you made history feel personal. What books provided inspiration to you for the structure or genre of your book?

Jenn Shapland: Biographies make me crazy, because they hold so many amazing true stories, but they can be so daunting. They’re almost always strictly chronological, and as a nonfiction writer, chronological order rarely feels real or alive to me. But I’m invested in the power of life writing, and I knew I wanted to write about Carson’s life. I just had to do it my own way. A bunch of writers working in hybrid genres and short-form sections provided a way to think about structuring the book. Maggie Nelson’s The Red Parts combines memoir and true crime, but also offers a biography of Nelson’s Aunt Jane Mixer in the process of reckoning with her death. In both Citizen and Don’t Let Me Be Lonely, Claudia Rankine allows small encounters and interactions in her daily life to fuel a larger argument about marginalization and discrimination of black women, and I definitely drew from her work, using similar material to make a case for lesbian invisibility. I’ve loved Lydia Davis’ short stories for a long time, and her most recent book, Can’t and Won’t, used recountings and translations of other people’s stories (from Flaubert’s anecdotes to her own dreams) as the material for her fiction. I also admire the way her titles contribute so much to each story, and had her in the back of my mind when titling chapters in My Autobiography.

MH: There have been other biographies of Carson McCullers written, but yours is the first to deeply examine her life as a lesbian. Are there other authors writing about history from an #OwnVoices perspective whom you admire?

JS: I definitely long for more of this work, and I’m constantly seeking it out (and frequently disappointed when books fail to go there). Usually, it seems that biographies and histories about queer people have been written by people who aren’t queer and who aren’t invested in queer history. Many of the erasures and elisions I discovered in published narratives of Carson’s life had all of the facts in hand, but failed to make connections that, to me, were obvious. Another way to put this: Queer readers have known that Carson’s life and work were queer forever, but that knowledge never made it into the public record. Meanwhile, marriages and divorces became the primary lenses for viewing a person’s romantic life and sexual identity. Anything that wasn’t a legally certified relationship, no matter how clear it might be in letters and interviews, doesn’t make it into the official narrative. Pip Gordon’s new book Gay Faulkner is a great approach to understanding a writer’s life and work in terms of their relationship with queer people and ideas.

MH: At what point did you think you had the makings of a book? Who were some of the instrumental forces in helping you shape the book?

JS: I began writing the book in earnest during a writing residency at Vermont Studio Center while I was still in graduate school working on an unrelated project. Being around other writers and artists who were serious about their work changed everything for me, and the friendships I formed there, particularly with artist Katie Loughmiller and poet Anis Mojgani, were my lifelines in the early stages of writing. I had similar experiences at the Tin House Writers Workshop, which showed me that even without an MFA or a foot in the publishing world it’s possible to build a life around writing. My time at Yaddo actually wound up in the book, because inhabiting the place where McCullers wrote several of her novels had a major impact on my writing and research. Later on in the process, my agent, Bill Clegg, and the book’s first editor, Emma Komlos-Hrobsky, were generous, critical readers and I credit them with believing in a fairly spare manuscript and encouraging it to become fully fleshed book.

MH: If you could imagine interacting with Carson, what would that setting look like? What would you want to take away from the experience?

JS: I picture her when she’s older, sitting in her favorite blue chair or on the porch. I would ask her what she’s reading and I’d ask some burning questions about her contemporaries, which would lead to some fabulous queer gossip (for example: what is up with Patricia Highsmith?). I hope that we would laugh a lot and feel a kind of kinship. But I’ve spent enough time thinking about how we interact with people we don’t know to realize that’s all my wishful projection.

MH: Since this interview is for an audience of booksellers and you spent some time as a bookseller while you were writing and contemplating this book, I would be remiss if I didn’t ask you a bookstore-related question! How did your bookselling experience impact your book?

JS: Working at BookPeople in Austin from 2009–2016 was the best job, because I got to be surrounded by books and passionate readers and I had time to think. Spending a lot of time in a bookstore makes it clear what subjects have gotten a lot of attention, and what gaps remain to be filled, what connections have yet to be made. The memoir section was right next to the biography section at BookPeople, so perhaps my desire to bring those two genres together in my own book was inspired while shelving.

An Indies Introduce Q&A With Author Jenn Shapland. By Mimi Hannan.   American Booksellers Association, January 28, 2020. 

“I have read enough biographies,” Jenn Shapland writes early in her new book, “to know, in no uncertain terms, that they are built of artifice and lies. I am not a fiction writer, and this is not a biography.”

I take her point that biography is a subjective enterprise, though I wonder about the hyperbole. The book’s title—My Autobiography of Carson McCullers—has already told us that this is actually a memoir, with the writer using McCullers’s life to comprehend her own. It’s a familiar device—like Helen Macdonald’s hawk or Julie Powell’s Julia Child. Near the book’s end, Shapland reminds us, “Biography and its presumptions have bothered me for some time.” This is so insistent that it prompts the question: Does Shapland really intend to litigate the problems inherent in biography as literary pursuit, or is she excusing the endeavor of her own book?

As a graduate student, Shapland was an intern at the Harry Ransom Center, the University of Texas repository that buys up the ephemera of seemingly every writer: Gabriel García Márquez, Don DeLillo, Rachel Cusk. An academic’s request introduced Shapland to the correspondence between a woman named Annemarie Clarac-Schwarzenbach and Carson McCullers, perhaps most famous for her 1940 novel The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, surely one of American literature’s most remarkable debuts. Shapland’s interest is piqued:

     ‘Annemarie’s language in her letters to Carson is intimate, suggestive, or I read it that way. You remember. I had received letters like these. I had written letters like these to the women I’d loved. It was very little to go on, and yet I felt an utter certainty: Carson McCullers had loved women.’

This suggestion that a writer firmly within the American canon—albeit one whom she’d not read—might have loved women strikes a nerve. “I am as hesitant to ascribe steady narrative meaning to my own life as to any other’s,” Shapland writes. “But I suppose we could call those letters a turning point.” She’s moved to catalog the writer’s effects, which have been waiting for a scholar’s attention for years; she cuts her hair short and embraces the label lesbian; she abandons her hunt for an academic job to write the book we’re reading. Whatever transpired between Annemarie and Carson might be open to a biographer’s interpretation; what happens between Jenn and Carson seems clearly like love.

If McCullers provided salvation, helping Shapland emerge once and for all from the closet, now the younger writer has an opportunity to return the favor. But she is wary. She cites this, from Josyane Savigneau’s 2001 McCullers biography: “The labels lesbian and bisexual ... have also been used by partisans of homosexuality—both male and female—who would appropriate the writer for their cause.” Shapland writes, “Her description positions me as a ‘partisan of homosexuality’ seeking to ‘appropriate’ Carson’s story for my ‘cause.’ And perhaps I am.”

This circumspection is unnecessary and dulls the work’s effect. Authorial hesitation is fine—probably commendable!—but its recurrence feels less like an intellectual complication and more like nervous tic. To be queer—different in whatever fashion you are—is superb preparation for the task of criticism. You meet Harriet the Spy with that frisson of recognition. You read A Separate Peace waiting for the teen protagonists to kiss (fraternal love, give me a break). This is a survival strategy (You are not alone in the world) and we learn to deploy it on the page and in reality.

Shapland both is and is not looking for evidence. She notes the case of Eleanor Roosevelt, whose relationship with Lorena Hickok was posthumously revised into friendship. Queerness, like fog, dissipates over time: “If it can’t be proved with direct evidence of sexual intimacy, it never happened. And if you’re looking for evidence, it won’t ever be published.” In transcripts of McCullers’s therapy sessions (recorded as raw material for an autobiography), she seems to find it. Copyright constraints prohibit her from quoting most of what she locates, but of course it’s immaterial. Queerness was in McCullers’s dress, her work, her social circle, her life. To pretend otherwise is to maintain that the sky is beige.

Shapland’s is a quest for the self. A snatch of McCullers’s childhood memory recalls her own. McCullers’s health troubles (she was partially paralyzed by a stroke at 31; she died at only 50) echo her own struggles with chronic illness. She sees the book as atonement: “… for my own closeted years, I am determined to shed light, to expose even those things that are difficult about a writer’s life. To track the rewritings, the omissions, the revisions.” This is so ambitious as to be impossible.

My Autobiography might have dwelt even longer than it does on the resonances between the lives of author and subject: Shapland cuts herself off, as though she’s using McCullers cheaply. But we all read selfishly. This text is more than mere fan letter, and if the author had allowed herself to go further, I wonder what she might have found?

Her understanding of archival practices and affection for McCullers make Shapland an informed critic. She might have probed deeper into why the Ransom Center holds McCullers’s coat as well as her correspondence. She stays as a guest at McCullers’s childhood home and could have spent more time on why such sites endure and whether they’re good stewards of an artist’s legacy. This book might have been broader, a more robust hybrid of memoir and criticism. I will say, though, that it made me return to The Heart is a Lonely Hunter; I sense that Shapland would consider that mission accomplished.

Finding Carson McCullers. By Rumaan Alam. The New Republic , February 21, 2020.

When I was 17,  my uncle handed me a copy of The Ballad of the Sad Café. I had never heard of Carson McCullers. I devoured the collection. Years later I thanked him for the introduction, and he chuckled and half-apologized. “Kind of bleak, for a teenager,” he said. What I would have responded, were I someone who is able to come up with good things to say on the spot, is: Being a teenager is already pretty bleak, so I might as well have some company.

Carson came to me, via said uncle, in my final years of high school, during my first dips into the melancholia that has lingered in my peripheries for 10-plus years. I grew up in rural New England; it was idyllic and I did love it, but I was constantly aware of its smallness, its limitations. I was seen, I’m absolutely certain, as “normal,” but inside I often felt despairing, lonely, impatient. Like so many of Carson’s characters, I was desperate for my life — my real life — to start.

Jenn Shapland, whose My Autobiography of Carson McCullers is out today from Tin House, was in her mid-20s when Carson came to her. (Shapland calls her Carson, so I’m going to call her Carson, too.) She was in the archives of UT’s Ransom Center, where she worked for two years as she earned her PhD. A scholar requested the letters between Carson and Annemarie Schwarzenbach, and Shapland descended into the archives to retrieve them. What she found was a set of intimate correspondences, in which she immediately detected romance. “Other than my own, I had never read love letters between women before,” she writes. At the time, Shapland was grappling with her own sexuality, her ambitions, her identity. She, too, was hoping her life would start and questioning what that life should be.

This discovery set her on a years-long journey to unearth, retrace, understand, and even embody Carson’s life — particularly her life of love. The resulting book brilliantly interweaves Carson’s personal history with Shapland’s own. “To tell another person’s story,” Shapland explains, “a writer must make that person some version of herself, must find a way to inhabit her.” Shapland achieves this identity merger, to some extent. She lives in Carson’s childhood home in Columbus, Georgia, reads countless pages of transcripts from her therapy sessions, visits Yaddo, and examines her subject’s collection of coats and nightgowns, searching for clues, searching for answers, and in some ways, searching for herself. To see these pieces fit together, Shapland writes, “[Y]ou have to read like a queer person, like someone who knows what it’s like to be closeted, and who knows how to look for reflections of your own experience in even the most unlikely places.”

Carson’s relationship with Annemarie is relatively well known and frequently cited, as are her many friendships with other queer writers and artists, and her fiction’s atypical empathy toward homosexuality, blackness, and disability in the mid-20th century. Nonetheless, Carson is historically categorized as a straight woman (she was married twice, to the same man) who entertained “infatuations” and close friendships with other women. The question that propels Shapland’s book is not whether or not Carson was a lesbian; she’s not trying to prove, exactly. What she’s trying to do is see herself in history, show herself (and us) that Carson and other queer people have always lived, always loved, always made community for themselves.

One of the ways Shapland asserts her own existence, and the existence of a rich history of lesbians living and loving, is through the physical remnants of that history. Carson’s clothes, some of which were given to the Ransom Center, are crucial in this respect. Shapland measures and examines them in detail — more than she ever has with her own clothing. She describes a room in Carson’s house in Georgia which is lined with glass cases housing Carson’s old possessions: things like eyeglasses, a cigarette case, a wallet. They are mundane objects, but ones that prove Carson’s life, and thus make tangible the existence of a person whose identity has been glossed over by popular memory. “[I]f indeed there hardly is a lesbian history,” Shapland asks, “do I exist?”

At its core, Shapland’s book is about gaps — in stories, in language, in history, in ourselves — and how we attempt to fill them. Shapland casts aspersions on historians and critics who have called Carson a tomboy (“whatever that is […] I cannot imagine her displaying athletic ability, and she was by no means butch”), or her wardrobe as “mannish” (“how many men wear lapels that large, cuffs that long? What about all the embroidery, the beading? Though now I am gender policing”). The challenge, as she sees it, “is how little common language we have to communicate androgyny, ambiguity. We rely on binary terms […] to convey what is at heart both, or neither.” Shapland marvels at the historical rewriting of Carson’s life, in which she had “obsessions” with women, but of course, she was straight — because people are straight. Where there is no equivocal language to account for equivocal history, there is only lack.

Shapland detects queerness everywhere, but her findings are usually ignored, if not outright refuted. The director of the Carson McCullers Center in Columbus tells her “in no uncertain terms” that Carson and her therapist Dr. Mary Mercer were “never romantically involved.” At Yaddo, the artist residency in the Hudson Valley that Carson adored, and where she met another of her paramours, the residency director Elizabeth Ames, Shapland sees holes in the tour guide’s description of the benefactor family. She questions these relationships: Who was involved with whom? And to what extent? “Women? Men? […] Were they all enmeshed? None of these questions were answered on the tour, though I asked.” Apparently, queerness is not part of Yaddo’s self-mythologizing. In a section titled “Googling,” Shapland describes reading Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones while at Yaddo: “[W]ithin a minute I was typing ‘Natalie Goldberg lesbian’ into the search bar. I cannot tell you the number of times I have typed this search with different women’s names.” What she finds, perhaps unsurprisingly, and in a fitting metaphor for her entire project, is ambiguity.

Ambivalence is reflected and refracted in the book’s very structure. My Autobiography of Carson McCullers is made up of vignettes, some only a sentence long and some that span deeply researched pages. These pieces are grouped and sorted by topic and time, in keeping with Shapland’s archivist training, but there is also a certain amount of slipperiness to them, a constant regenerating and layering effect that renders the categories somewhat irrelevant. Shapland resists classification and prescription at every turn, opting for gray over black-and-white whenever possible. Her role, then, is less as biographer than as translator, rereading and queering Carson’s life for an audience that has only had access to a fraction of the story.

Of course, for Carson and her contemporaries, it was expected that queer “behaviors” be shrouded in normativity. As Freudian psychology gained popularity, so too did the idea that long-term homosexual behavior — particularly when undisguised by heterosexual partnership — was a pathology. Carson adhered to these strictures, marrying Reeves McCullers for convenience while engaging in intense affairs with women, residing in the famed February House in Brooklyn, and living apart from Reeves for essentially their entire marriage. It bears mentioning that Carson was accused of other pathologies, as well — she was chronically ill, and doctors often explained away her sicknesses as “psychological episodes.” In reality, she suffered a series of strokes, starting at the age of 23, incurred partly due to a misdiagnosed bout of rheumatic fever in her teens. Shapland, too, has a chronic illness that often leaves her exhausted, diagnosed in her early 20s. Invisible illnesses put the sick in the horrible position of constantly having to explain themselves, prove themselves, or else pretend. “The psychologizing of illness complicates the relationship between self and body,” Shapland writes. “If any malady can be connected to a patient’s psychology it follows that […] they could cure themselves.” Carson and Shapland are only two on an infinitely long list of women who were made to feel crazy, instead of simply sick.

Shapland’s book was catalyzed in part by Carson’s relationship with therapy and with her therapist, Dr. Mary Mercer. Carson began seeing Mary when she was 41 and convinced Mary to allow the sessions to be recorded and transcribed. Mary kept them private until her death in 2012, and in 2014 they were released. “[B]oth Mary and Carson describe these transcripts as an attempt at writing her autobiography,” Shapland explains. There is a lot of talk about writers in therapy, about writing as therapy, but therapy as writing? It’s an appealing concept, and a convenient one for a writer who struggles with introspection. Carson’s characters are, perhaps, more developed than Carson herself: “[I]t’s clear enough that she, a writer renowned for her psychological insight and emotional acuity on the page, is still at a loss as to how to articulate who she is.” This technique may very well have been a way for Carson to remove herself from her own mind, to analyze — or create — herself the way she would one of her characters. Shapland fills some of the holes left by Carson’s therapeutic testimony, chiming in to offer analysis where Carson couldn’t, or wouldn’t.

Shapland herself, on the other hand, is the archetypal therapy patient. Her experiences in counseling are interspersed throughout the book, mirroring and offsetting Carson’s sessions with Mary. Shapland is contemplative and anxious, plagued by impostor syndrome. At every turn, she is astonished when doors are opened, offers extended. All success feels like a fluke. She worries, even, that the very essence of her project is corrupt: “I became afraid that in the very process of trying to know her, I would somehow change her.”

At the same time, Shapland feels protective of her singular relationship with Carson, defensive when other people claim to “love” her. Through her rewriting of Carson’s biography, a kind of ownership emerges: Oh, you love her, do you? Are you writing a book about her? Not wanting to be one of these intrusive, presumptuous people, I mentioned my anxiety about writing this review to my own therapist: Am I attempting to take Carson away from Shapland? Am I appropriating her? If one day I happen to meet Shapland, will I be able to resist telling her I reviewed her book, stole a little piece of Carson’s legacy, inserted myself into the story? (The outcome of this debate is self-evident.)

My own experiences with therapy started in high school, around the time I first read Carson’s work. The routine remains an essential part of my emotional well-being. In retrospect, it’s an interesting time to have begun such a process: I was engaging in identity-making and personal storytelling at the precipice of my adulthood. I hadn’t thought of it this way until I read Shapland’s astute assessment that “[t]herapy has a lot in common with memoir: It’s telling your story.” Successful counseling, Shapland asserts, is just narrative-making through trial and error. At one point, she describes a session that helped her “shape a new narrative, one that wasn’t so strict and unforgiving.” A good therapist is like a good editor: she knows all your previous work, all your tricks, and never lets you get away with lazy storytelling.

When I read The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, the book for which Carson is probably most famous, the man I was dating sneered over my shoulder, “Isn’t that a YA novel?” Carson is not, for Library of Congress cataloging purposes, a young adult author. But here is yet another place where official categories mean very little. Her books do speak to a certain type of anguished, searching youth that resonated with me when I was 17, and still does. Many of her characters (like my favorite one, Frankie, the 12-year-old protagonist in The Member of the Wedding who yearns to be part of something bigger and fixates on her brother’s wedding) are struggling through adolescence, feeling like outsiders for reasons that are invisible to everyone else.

That sense of longing and displacement clearly resonates with Shapland and is in part to thank for the existence of this book. In one of the very first sections, Shapland describes the “slow burning catastrophe of [her] twenties,” in which she realizes she’s halfway down the wrong path (academia) and isn’t sure where to turn. “I could tell I wasn’t cut out to be an archivist. I didn’t have the patience, and I spent too much time trying to solve mysteries of my own creation,” she writes, after listing the other occupations she’s certain she wouldn’t enjoy or be good at. Luckily for us, she turns to Carson, and spends 200-plus pages proving herself wrong about the archivist bit. She is a diligent, perceptive, and heartful researcher. Following along with Shapland-as-detective is a delight, and the mystery she sets out to solve is one of those wicked unsolvables: how do we account for the apertures in language, history, and identity? Shapland describes “the only story [Carson] ever wrote: a lonely misfit wrestles with her hidden self, unable to articulate her own longings.” It seems Shapland, too, has written that story.

 Rewriting McCullers. By Ellie Duke. Los Angeles Review of Books , February 4, 2020

The moment I found the archived letter that explicitly referred to Octavia Butler as a lesbian, I immediately texted all the people in my contact list who might give a damn. Sure, several of her obituaries used the word as if it were fact, but that caused a bit of an uproar amongst the faithful crew who maintained that she only ever claimed the identity of hermit. “We have proof!” I typed and typed again. Of course, this was no certain proof—these weren’t Butler’s archival materials or even the materials of someone who knew her all that well. I didn’t care. The casual and confident use of the word “lesbian” by one of her contemporaries was enough for me.

Our (etymological) creation myth is well-known: a charismatic poet, an island of women, and several scraps of papyrus containing poetic fragments of their love. This piecemeal proof has inspired gaggles of scholars throughout the ages to spend ample page space developing what’s become known as The Sappho Question. “Was she? Wasn’t she? Would she have used the word?” It’s evident Sappho wrote poems celebrating erotic love for women, yet somehow, such willful disbelief persists. At the very least, let us name our namesake.

Now here I am, typing “was Octavia Butler a lesbian” into Google. (As far as I can tell, the jury’s out.) This isn’t the first time I’ve caught myself asking my own version of The Question. “Was Emily Dickinson/Sylvia Plath/Julia Child a lesbian.” Like Jenn Shapland, the most recent addition to my library of lesbian writers, “I cannot tell you the number of times I’ve typed this search with different women’s names.” She understands the compulsion. She won’t judge me. Besides, we’re not attempting to disprove speculation in some act of lesbian erasure masked as responsible scholarship. We’re asking The Question to give our speculation legs.

Yes, locating lesbians is about naming people as our kin, but it’s also about collecting a body of literature that speaks to our experiences of desire, identity, and language. We seek literature we can love that also loves us back. Literature that feels lesbian, even when an explicitly lesbian character isn’t present. Just as Bertha Harris claimed Djuna Barnes, so Shapland claims the famously ambiguous southern novelist in My Autobiography of Carson McCullers. Or does she? She might refer to Carson McCullers as a lesbian, but “to claim” implies ownership. This is something else.

Though I’d never heard of Carson McCullers’ work until graduate school at a southern institution, she was wildly popular during her lifetime. McCullers’ debut novel, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1940), became an immediate bestseller, and her second novel, Reflections in a Gold Eye (1941), was adapted into a film starring Marlon Brando as a closeted US Army officer and Elizabeth Taylor as his wife. She was awarded two Guggenheim Fellowships and was allowed to come and go from Yaddo pretty much as she pleased. Richard Wright deemed her the first white southern writer to handle black characters with as much ease as those of her own race and Tennessee Williams considered her the greatest writer of her generation. McCullers’ work consistently explores queer desires, yet the fact that she married a man, divorced him, and then married and divorced him again seemed to some biographers to be a case against lesbianism. Still, her intense relationships with women are well-documented, and upon the release of McCullers’ therapy session transcripts in 2013 (transcribed because McCullers hoped to use them as the basis of her autobiography), the world gained even more documentation.

In No Archive Will Restore You, Julietta Singh describes two different ways of thinking about “the emergence of desire,” both in terms of archival research and more generally: it bursts forth from a single moment that drastically alters the trajectory of your life, or it gradually accumulates through a repetition of behaviors and longings. “While I know that my desire for [what the archive might have to offer] is in reality a long accrual,” she writes, “I imagine it as this single solitary moment.”

In the study of lesbian history, the desire for proof is generally one the researcher doesn’t expect or even want to have satisfied. Queer research can feel like a secret club, where evidence is stored only within the blood that rushes from our bellies to our cheeks and is exchanged via intuition and rumor. When Shapland finds her proof, several years into researching McCullers, she’s overwhelmed by the verification of that which she’d known all along. Her girlfriend doesn’t share in her sense of shock. “‘Isn’t this what you were looking for?’” she asks. “‘Well,’” responds Shapland, “‘I didn’t think I’d actually find it.’”

I’m not ruining anything—this moment of discovery happens fairly early in the book. Which is to say, proof might be relevant, but it’s not the point. Often, the act of writing a biography is one on hand an attempt to uncover some previously unseen truth about a person, and on the other an effort to establish narrative or analytical meaning to the messiness of life. For Shapland, it’s more about finding a way to accept the mess in all its absences and utterances and to be honest with herself and her readers about what it is she wants from the archive. Ultimately, Shapland’s book aims to behold a woman she’ll never meet and to love her without laying claim.

McCullers died before she finished her autobiography, released posthumously in its very incomplete form as Illumination and Night Glare (2002). There is something profoundly tender in the way Shapland treats the series of incompletions and irresolutions she traces across the author’s life. Though McCullers ultimately decided her therapy transcripts were worthless, Shapland sees a book in their starts and stops, erasures, lost pages, and unprovable suggestions.

While it’s unclear whether McCullers ever had sex with any of the women she longed for—which for way too many people is the only acceptable “proof” of lesbianism—Shapland leaves open the very real possibility without needing it to be fact. What she sees in Carson, as she calls her, is “a familiarly protracted becoming” that she can only render imperfectly: “I wonder, constantly, what I might be omitting, revising, censoring. What I am unable to see or let be seen. About Carson, and about myself.” This kind of love acknowledges the fundamental separation between lover and beloved while also understanding that through our most deeply-held desires, “we are shards of others.”

The act of piecing ourselves together through each other shows up again and again in lesbian literature. Sure, it can fringe on enmeshment when done possessively and without regard for one’s own motivations, and that’s a stereotype that makes for a handful of easy punchlines. But all jokes aside (cue joke about humorless lesbians), what so often gets overlooked is the great possibility in considering self-creation as a collaborative work of love in which we carry the bodies of others within our own. “Nothing about you has faded,” says Jeanette Winterson’s nameless narrator of Written on the Body. “You are still the colour of my blood. You are my blood. When I look in the mirror its not my own face I see. Your body is twice. Once you once me.” The woman that the narrator loves is dead, but not. The narrator is the woman that she loves, but not. When we continually re-make ourselves and each other through intimacy, we’re never done becoming.

The erotic, as Audre Lorde describes it, is “a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings.” Lesbian literature seldom traffics in the rhetoric of the self-made hero; to live fully requires tapping into the space between who we think we are and what we feel, which so very often has to do with what or whom we desire. Lorde did not write a memoir, but instead a “biomythography” she titled Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, after a Carriacou word meaning “women who work together as friends and lovers.” To write of life as a myth might seem like a dishonest act of exaggeration or idealization, yet Lorde uses the idea of mythos to frame the narration of life as inextricable from the expansive web of stories that change us.When Shapland dedicates her book to “Your Carson,” she gives her work over to her readers so they too can behold McCullers, identify with her, and become themselves. She belongs to no one and everyone and will remain, like the rest of us, eternally and beautifully incomplete. So when I refer to Carson McCullers and Octavia Butler as lesbians, I do so out of existential necessity, but also, and especially, for the sake of love.

Googling Literary Lesbians: On Carson McCullers and the Erotics of Incompletion. By Sarah Heying. LitHub , February 4, 2020.

Page on the Jenn Shapland’s website