In the US, it was a National Book award finalist Carmen Maria Machado calls it – preposterously, given the single note it sounds – 'symphonic'. It could not be more modish, from the floating paragraphs of its fractured narrative to its breathless quoting of Maggie Nelson (of whom, incidentally, I’m a fan). Its mere existence stands as a warning of the cul-de-sac into which publishing has lately wandered (I mean, run, blindfolded, at full tilt). Still, I’m glad to have read My Autobiography of Carson McCullers. It’s a diminishment that invites another kind of invisibility and I think McCullers (and all of them) would have despised it. how reductive this is and how antiquated. Like many of the other women in the book, she is seen almost entirely through the prism of her sexuality. In all the pointing, McCullers’s work is lost Shapland is keen on the novels’ queerness, but never gets too involved with their literary achievements. She wants to name lesbians – to use the word, over and over – not only as a point of principle, but because it does her such good. such a declaration cannot disguise the fact that her (over) identification with McCullers takes us nowhere that is very productive. My Autobiography of Carson McCullers, as its too-clever-by-half-sounding title implies, is neither memoir nor biography.
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