The fact that biographers have mostly ignored and sometimes explicitly denied McCullers’s lesbianism exposes the problematic nature of the whole endeavor of traditional biography: instead of presenting truth, biographies are by definition shaped by the perspective of their authors.
McCullers was initially unsure how to address her future husband’s question, but Jenn Shapland successfully argues that soon McCullers’s queer sexuality was central to both her personality and her writing. Carson answered with a swift denial, wished aloud that she wasn’t one, then expressed plain uncertainty.” Reeves, to whom McCullers was twice married, suspected even before their first marriage that McCullers’s relationships with women (whom he began calling her “imaginary friends”) were relationships built on same-sex love and desire. I picture them on a swing, though I know for a fact that no such swing exists. My Autobiography of Carson McCullers begins with a story that frames the whole text: “Reeves asked Carson if she was a lesbian on the front porch of Carson’s house on Stark Avenue, after everyone had gone to sleep. Shepland, however, is interested in two more specific questions: how does a biographer’s perspective shape how the subject of the biography is understood, and how does the process of researching and writing a biography affect how a biographer thinks about herself.
McCullers, the mid-twentieth-century white southern writer who explored themes of isolation, alienation, and otherness in novels such as The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter and The Member of the Wedding, has been the subject of such studies before, including the biographies written by Virginia Spencer Carr and Josyane Savigneau.
Unlike most researchers who have written about Carson McCullers, Shapland is not trying to write a traditional or comprehensive biography. The title of Jenn Shapland’s first book, My Autobiography of Carson McCullers, cleverly shows her goal of creating a genre-bending book, a combination of memoir and biography.
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