Mercer herself “refused biographers permission to use letters (those that existed). Shapland interrogates the erasure of queerness in the archives and in literary biography. Her McCullers was a lesbian and not, as her biographers have described her, a confused woman in a loving but starcrossed relationship with Reeves, the man she married twice. Recognizing in Carson the queerness that shaped her own identity, Shapland set out to uncover as much as she could about McCullers’s love of women. She denied it, but admitted to intense relationships with women. In it, McCullers recounted her boyfriend Reeves asking her at nineteen if she was a lesbian. The initial connection between Shapland and McCullers is sparked in an archive when Shapland uncovers a transcript of a session between McCullers and her therapist and likely lover, Dr. The intimacy Shapland forges with the McCullers of the archives is deep, earnest, and compassionate.Ĭonversations with librarians are not the focus of Shapland’s project, but archives are everywhere, from her own internship at the Ransom Center to her residency at the Carson McCullers Center for Writers and Musicians. The narrative traverses time and location, landing the reader in the Ransom Center’s reading room and in the bathtub of McCullers’s childhood home where Shapland spends a residency soaking, reading, and writing. Brief vignettes about Shapland’s life and research are intertwined with descriptions of letters, transcripts, photographs, and novels from the nine archival collections referenced.
Jenn Shapland’s My Autobiography of Carson McCullers is best described as a piece of braided nonfiction.
There’s a call to create, a response, and a responsibility. In the hands of a writer or filmmaker (see Todd Haynes’s new The Velvet Underground or Angelo Madsen Minax’s astonishing North by Current), there’s a collaborative relationship between creator and archivist negotiating with the past to curate and contextualize. And it is through the use of archives that hidden lives are made public, celebrated, or obscured. Archives and archivists’ work shimmer with frisson: the tension between the public and the personal, the privilege of accessing someone’s most private selves. In my conversations with students interested in librarianship, I have noted a shared awe regarding archival work and assembly.
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