![]() ![]() At the time, Shapland was grappling with her own sexuality, her ambitions, her identity. “Other than my own, I had never read love letters between women before,” she writes. What she found was a set of intimate correspondences, in which she immediately detected romance. ![]() A scholar requested the letters between Carson and Annemarie Schwarzenbach, and Shapland descended into the archives to retrieve them. (Shapland calls her Carson, so I’m going to call her Carson, too.) She was in the archives of UT’s Ransom Center, where she worked for two years as she earned her PhD. ![]() ![]() Jenn Shapland, whose My Autobiography of Carson McCullers is out today from Tin House, was in her mid-20s when Carson came to her. Like so many of Carson’s characters, I was desperate for my life - my real life - to start. I was seen, I’m absolutely certain, as “normal,” but inside I often felt despairing, lonely, impatient. I grew up in rural New England it was idyllic and I did love it, but I was constantly aware of its smallness, its limitations. What I would have responded, were I someone who is able to come up with good things to say on the spot, is: Being a teenager is already pretty bleak, so I might as well have some company.Ĭarson came to me, via said uncle, in my final years of high school, during my first dips into the melancholia that has lingered in my peripheries for 10-plus years. “Kind of bleak, for a teenager,” he said. Years later I thanked him for the introduction, and he chuckled and half-apologized. WHEN I WAS 17, my uncle handed me a copy of The Ballad of the Sad Café. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |