In the process, I came up against gaps in the narrative, biases from other people’s takes on her, and significant erasures and revisions that didn’t correspond to what I found in Carson’s own firsthand writing, therapy session transcripts, and correspondence. SHAPLAND: When I learned that Carson McCullers had wanted to write an autobiography but never finished it, I decided I would try to recover her story as she saw it. What inspired the style of this book, part biography, part autobiography? And how do you think it helped convey your message? It was also a finalist for the National Book Award and longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction. In addition to the Christian Gauss Award, My Autobiography of Carson McCullers has won the Publishing Triangle Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction and a Lambda Literary Award. In My Autobiography of Carson McCullers, Shapland weaves her own story with McCullers’, and the result is an exploration of identity, queerness, memory, obsession, and love.Īs Harper’s BAZAAR puts it, Shapland’s work is “two books in one: an examination of a famous author whose narrative has been posthumously taken away from her, but also a vital memoir of Shapland’s own experience as a queer woman looking for stories about people like her.” What Shapland does not find is the McCullers that has been portrayed by history. In these letters, intimate and brazen in the articulation of emotion, Shapland discovered herself and her own identity as a queer woman.
Shapland’s second book, a collection of essays titled Thin Skin, is forthcoming from Pantheon Books.Īs an intern working in the archives at the Harry Ransom Center, Shapland discovered love letters written to the late American writer Carson McCullers from Annemarie Clarac-Schwarzenbach, the Swiss heiress with whom McCullers had an affair. in English from the University of Texas at Austin and is currently working as an archivist for a visual artist. Shapland is a writer whose essays have been published in the New York Times, New England Review, Tin House, Outside, and Guernica. It also pays tribute to the late Christian Gauss, a distinguished Princeton University scholar, teacher, and dean who also served as president of the national organization of Phi Beta Kappa.
The award was established by the Phi Beta Kappa Senate in 1954 to honor superlative books in the field of literary scholarship or criticism.
My Autobiography of Carson McCullers: A Memoir by Jenn Shapland (Tin House) is the 2021 recipient of the Christian Gauss Award.
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