She found other relationships with women which have not previously been described in biographies about McCullers. Mary Mercer, with whom McCullers had a relationship beyond the professional one. Shapland also went through transcripts of McCullers’ therapy sessions with Dr. “You have to read like a queer person, like someone who knows what it’s like to be closeted, and who knows how to look for reflections of your own experience in even the most unlikely places,” Shapland says of her innovative approach to this innovative work of non-fiction. Shapland had a lot of material to sort through in her extensive research, including cataloging McCullers’ personal effects living at her home, now a museum in Columbus, Georgia and spending time at Yaddo, the writers’ colony in Saratoga Springs, New York where McCullers spent time in the 1940s and in 1954. As she says: “I kept coming out through my project.” The chapters are short, sometimes humorous, and contain facts, questions and reflections on queer life. The book is a stimulating approach to memoir, as Shapland explores the previously untold life of Carson McCullers while stepping into her own.
We like to learn about others who are part of our “family.” As Shapland puts it: “It’s not all that important to me to define what it is to be a lesbian – constant shifting, the ever-new – but I can’t help but want to know who else is at the table with me, who I can call kin.” The finding of such letters is significant to members of the queer community.
Jenn Shapland wasn’t particularly a fan of the writing of Carson McCullers, the American writer whose first novel was The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, but when she came across some of McCullers’ love letters, a particular journey began.ĭiscovered while Shapland was an intern in the archives at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas, the letters were an exchange between McCullers and Annemarie Clarac-Schwarzenbach, a Swiss writer who spent time in New York in the 1930s and 1940s.
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