![]() ![]() ![]() To tell her own story, a writer must make herself a character. My Autobiography of Carson McCullers is a memoir about that journey. A lesbian herself, Shapland discovered the letters during what she calls “the tail end of the major, slow-burning catastrophe” of her 20s, when she was coming to terms with her feelings for a woman she publicly called her “roommate.” She set off on a journey to learn more about McCullers, and in doing so, about herself. She was also McCullers’ love interest - one of several women with whom the author was romantically involved over the course of a lifetime cut short by recurring strokes. Clarac-Schwarzenbach, she learned, was “a Swiss writer, photographer, silk heiress, and known lady killer” who spent time in New York in the 1930s and 40s. Back upstairs in her office, she started Googling. “Immediately, without articulating a reason, I wanted to know everything about them both,” Shapland writes in My Autobiography of Carson McCullers: A Memoir. After taking the freight elevator into the icy basement to pull the file, she started reading the letters. Then one day while Shapland was working as an intern at the Harry Ransom Center, an archive for writers’ papers at the University of Texas at Austin, a scholar wrote to ask for correspondence between McCullers and Annemarie Clarac-Schwarzenbach, whom Shapland hadn’t heard of at all. Although she’d heard of McCullers’ novels, including The Member of the Wedding and The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, she hadn’t read them. ![]() Growing up, Jenn Shapland didn’t know much about Carson McCullers. ![]()
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