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My Autobiography of Carson McCullers: A Memoir Audiobook
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Publisher Description
How do you tell the real story of someone misremembered―an icon and idol―alongside your own?
Jenn Shapland’s book is both question and answer: an immersive, surprising exploration of one of America’s most beloved writers, alongside a genre-defying examination of identity, queerness, memory, obsession, and love.
Shapland is a graduate student when she first uncovers letters written to Carson McCullers by a woman named Annemarie. Though Shapland recognizes herself in the letters, which are intimate and unabashed in their feelings, she does not see McCullers as history has portrayed her. Her curiosity gives way to fixation, not just with this newly discovered side of McCullers’s life but with how we tell queer love stories.
Why, Shapland asks, are the stories of women paved over by others’ narratives? What happens when constant revision is required of queer women trying to navigate and self-actualize in straight spaces? And what might the tracing of McCullers’s life―her history, her secrets, her legacy―reveal to Shapland about herself?
In smart, illuminating prose, Shapland interweaves her own story with McCullers’s to create a vital new portrait of one of our nation’s greatest literary treasures and shows us how the writers we love and the stories we tell about ourselves make us who we are.
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“A hard-won inquiry into how we seek out the truth of ourselves and others in ways that often, by necessity, aren’t straightforward, that arrive in our lives in glimmering bits and shards.”
— New York Times Book Review
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“An unpretentious, moving record of love at the margins.”
— New Yorker -
“Following along with Shapland-as-detective is a delight, and the mystery she sets out to solve is one of those wicked unsolvables.”
— Los Angeles Review of Books -
“Both a memoir of her own coming out and a nuanced exploration of her magnificent obsession with the Georgia author known for her sensitive portrayals of misfits.”
— Atlanta Journal-Constitution -
“A fine narrative of how the best writers express the deepest secrets of the heart.”
— Library Journal -
“Jenn Shapland’s…performance feels like an intimate podcast. Shapland’s voice reflects her self-discovery, making this listening experience seem far too short.”
— AudioFile
Awards
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Winner of the Reading the West Book Award's Advocacy Honor
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Finalist for the National Book Award
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Longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction
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An Amazon Editor’s Top Pick
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A BookRiot Pick of the Year's Best Books
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Winner of the Lambda Literary Award
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About Jenn Shapland
Jenn Shapland is an author whose work won a 2017 Pushcart Prize and gained her fellowships and/or residencies at Ucross, the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, Yaddo, the Carson McCullers Center for Writers and Musicians, and Vermont Studio Center. Her essays have been published in Tin House, Electric Literature, The Millions.com, and others. She has a PhD in English from the University of Texas at Austin and teaches in the creative writing department at the Institute of American Indian Arts.