Shapland writes that it exists “in the fluid distance between the writer and her subject, in the fashioning of a self… on the page”, which sounds exciting Katie Roiphe’s recent The Power Notebooks is on this territory and it’s brilliant. My Autobiography of Carson McCullers, as its too-clever-by-half-sounding title implies, is neither memoir nor biography. It would be up to her to put the record straight. With their genteel euphemisms (“companions”, “roommates”, “crushes”) and their obsession with McCullers’s husband, Reeves, whom the author married twice, those “burglars” had, she insisted to herself, effectively erased the writer’s sexuality. Feeling possessive, Shapland dismissed those she saw as her rivals, otherwise known as McCullers’s biographers. Objects, she found, offered her a McCullers that she could touch, even smell. Asked what she wanted to do for her second-year project at the library, she chose the personal effects collections, where she catalogued McCullers’s extraordinary clothes: her embroidered vests, the nightgowns she liked to wear under a coat, a gold lamé jacket with a magenta lining that still had a Saks tag on it. Within a year, she had begun “calling myself a lesbian for the first time”. Within a week, she had cut her hair short. But now she was captivated – and something shifted inside her. “Books seem to find me when I’m ready for them,” she writes, a statement that forewarns the reader, early on, of the Jenn-centred universe of her book. Shapland had not read McCullers’s novels.
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