Jenn Shapland, _My Autobiography of Carson McCullers_

AS SHAPLAND'S TITLE suggests, this is not exactly a biography of McCullers; Shapland tells us a lot about herself in it, but it's not exactly about her, either. Let's call it a meditation on what writers can come to mean to us even though our only relationship with them is actually only with the writing they left behind, much of which was not even intended for us, but which inexplicably has a power to explain us to ourselves. 

My Autobiography of Carson McCullers reminded me of A. J. A. Symons's brilliant but unorthodox Quest for Corvo (1934), in which he gives us a biography of the brilliant but unorthodox novelist Frederick Rolfe, who published as "Baron Corvo." Rather than start with Rolfe's birth and duly march readers forward to his death, Symons begins by telling us how he came to read Rolfe, how he began his investigations, what he found and where he found it, and how he was able to piece together Rolfe's life story. Biography as detective story, if you will.

Shapland's book is also about her investigations, her time in the archives, her spending time in the places McCullers spent time, her piecing together of a story...in this case, a story that (unlike Rolfe's) has already been entombed in weighty formal biographies (Virginia Spencer Carr, et al.). As with Symons's book, a portrait emerges that is all the more interesting because we have seen some of the process through which the portrait emerged.

Shapland goes much further than Symons does in revealing her own investment in the subject of her portrait, though. Rolfe was gay, and Symons straightforwardly acknowledges that while leaving his own sexuality out of the discussion. (Was Symons gay? On the one hand, he was married; on the other hand, he was also planning to write a biography of Wilde.) Shapland places McCullers's queerness in the foreground of the portrait right from the opening pages, and states plainly enough that writing about McCullers has been crucial in the recognition, acknowledgement, and embrace of her own lesbian sexuality. 

McCullers's other, more academic biographers tend to be cagier or more cautious on this subject. They tend to talk about bisexuality, conflicted feelings, ambiguity, that sort of thing. I don't know whether Shapland is right that Mary Mercer was McCullers's lover as well as a devoted friend. Clearly, Shapland wants Mercer to have been lover as well as friend, for reasons that have a lot to do with Shapland's own sense of kinship with her subject. In an academic biography, letting your own feelings tip the balance this way would not be okay...but it does feel okay here, because Shapland is so upfront about it, even calling our attention to it, and because it makes a valid point about how and why we read.

Shapland's portrait of McCullers has more than a bit of the portraitist in it, but Shapland is so honest about that (again, see title) that her book seems something more worth having than another biography.