My Autobiography of Carson McCullers (Staff Pick)
A genre-defying melding of memoir and biography rooted in archival and academic research as much as in personal experience. Carson McCullers (The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Ballad of the Sad Cafe, etc) is an oft-misunderstood and oft-forgotten Southern gothic novelist whose own story has been posthumously overwritten. Shapland draws from transcriptions of McCullers’ therapy sessions with Mary Mercy, who was both psychologist and lover to the author, to craft a meditation on how we tell queer love stories and how we preserve them in history, while she also considers her own queerness. For those who have a fascination with literary history, an appreciation for the archival record, and maybe a bit of an identity crisis, this is a brilliant experiment in both form and content.
