Beautiful and interesting. But still, DNF ( )

This was a good book in many ways. I liked how the writer formatted it and her concise wording. Very insightful. ( )

I enjoyed this book, it had a lot of fascinating insights and I learned a lot of interesting things. However, there was no wow factor to me, and nothing that really made me want to keep reading. I would recommend if you are looking to learn more about LGBTQ+ history and culture. ( )

A very unique approach to to writing in that the book is a combination biography and autobiography. Shapland is looking at the author Carson McCullers through the lens of her own life. Shapland is a lesbian and over the years, though married, McCullers' life seems to indicate that she was also although many would deny this. She had many long term relationships with women over the years. In the book Shapland places heavy emphasis on her relationship with her therapist. This was a time when lesbianism was closeted. This is a fascinating book and the author has done a great amount of research. ( )

This is a memoir of Jenn Shapland’s obsession with Carson McCullers and placing her as a lesbian, to authenticate Shapland’s own lesbianism. For me, as a reader, the book is marred by Shapland’s obsessive need to emphasise McCullers’ sexual orientation, but this single mindedness does provide a genuinely different narrative drive to the book and works well with Shapland’s structure for the book.
I read McCullers’ novels and short stories in a short period in 2000 to 2001, The Mortgaged Heart in 2009 and recently read Illuminations and Night Glare , McCullers’ unfinished “autobiography” (dictated, not written). I really enjoy her sad stories, even though they have no direct relationship with my lived experience, and she is one of my favourite authors. To the extent that I thought about McCullers’ own experience when reading her stories, I think that I had always assumed that she was a lesbian, a view that was confirmed for me from my reading of Illuminations and Night Glare .
I write the above, as I struggled with Jenn Shapland’s stridency in seeking to pigeonhole McCullers as a lesbian, and the importance that Shapland attaches to this. For me, McCullers’ lesbianism may necessarily be part of what she brings to her writing, through her experience as an outsider, but it is not paramount when considering her stories.
I was therefore very interested to read the article, White Writer, by Sarah Schulman in the October 21, 2016 of The New Yorker, which reflects on McCullers’ ability to seemingly authentically portay the lives of others, which concludes that this might be because McCullers was transgender. As Schulman notes, this was not a “label” commonly thought about in the 1930’s to 1960’s, but might be possible.
I then read, about two thirds through the book, Shapland’s analysis of the book:
So it isn’t about “Is Carson a lesbian?” or “Carson is a lesbian” or “What is a lesbian?” What I want to know is, how have lesbians got by and had relationships and found love and community? What does that look like?
And near the end of the book, talking about Shapland’s attitude to biographies:
Biographers break into the house and rearrange the furniture to their liking.

So, a good memoir, especially for readers who want to spend more time with McCullers, which is well written and includes humour, such as that of the people Shapland talks to mistaking Carson McCullers for Cormac McCarthy (another author I really like, but the contrast!).

Shapland makes the assertion that she has never met another person who has read Clock without Hands (1961), except at her urging. May I reassure her that there are many readers, although admittedly only 2,185 on GoodReads, compared to 95,304 readers of The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1940).

Read whilst listening to Lover, Beloved: Songs From An Evening With Carson McCullers by Suzanne Vega, which I recommend. ( )