my autobiography of carson mccullers a memoir

While working as an archivist, Shapland discovers overlooked love letters between Carson (one is always on a first name basis with one’s obsession) and another woman, Annemarie. Her first book, My Autobiography of Carson McCullers, recounts how she came to terms with her identity as a lesbian with a chronic illness, and charts her obsession with the long-dead writer who gives the book its title. Writer Jenn Shapland shares this capacity to shout where others have too long been quiet, to care more for a written offense than a defense. She’s got her own indefensible claim at the heart of it all, written in big type on the back of the book: “Everyone is female, and everyone hates it.” A provocation. Chu built up an internet following with frank essays about trans identity, and she brings the same hybrid of cultural criticism and personal experience to Females. “A preference for indefensible claims, for following our ambivalence to the end, for screaming when we should talk and laughing when we should scream.” She’s not writing about me (as much as I would like to imagine it), but about Valerie Solanas, author of the mostly forgotten 1965 play Up Your Ass, which becomes the focus of Chu’s own stocky little book. “We share this, I think,” writes Andrea Long Chu in her new book Females. Not, I’ve since learned, a bisexual, but a person who is ready to make bold claims and stand by them regardless of their veracity, just to shake people out of their daily assumptions. But then again, who needs experience to know?) She didn’t ask for proof. I did it for the challenge, to see her uncomprehending look as she tried to reconcile that fact with my boyfriend of two years, the one with braces and peach fuzz who stood behind us in line for lunch, as she must have wondered whether this meant I had had any experience with women. In the tenth grade, emboldened by youth, I pinky-swore to the most popular girl in school that I was bisexual.

My autobiography of carson mccullers a memoir