Carson and Reeves had never quite reached a level of comfort with physical intimacy.

The would come in and slap her, the mother would cry.” Carson was living in one of her own grotesque fictions. In the room next door to me there was a sick child, an idiot, who bawled all day. She describes her new marriage as “happy,” but says that she was left alone in a house “divided into little rabbit warrens with plywood partitions, and only one toilet to serve ten or more people. Reeves was working as a credit salesman, though he rarely came home with any money, and Carson stayed in their shitty apartment all day, trying to write but unable to hear herself think over all the fighting next door. In Carson’s words, “I must say that in all of his talk of wanting to be a writer, I never saw one single line he’d ever written except his letters.”

There is no evidence to suggest even remotely that this might be the case. Reeves, a writer who never wrote, was credited by numerous critics and reviewers throughout Carson’s life as the “real” Carson McCullers, the writer behind her books. Reeves later claimed that during that time he wrote a collection of essays, but no one saw his work. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.Ĭarson and Reeves moved to North Carolina, first Charlotte, then Fayetteville, soon after they married. Which is: not masculine, not feminine, but a both that becomes other.Carson McCullers, 1959. Here's how Shapland puts it: 'I've started making my own clothes in the years since I began this project, frustrated that clothes in stores don't really look or fit or feel the way I want to look and feel. The more Shapland learns about the legendary writer, the more she learns about herself and the more readers are apt to question the labels we impose on one another. Each is an outsider who is fascinating on her own but, together, they form a provocative look at what we reveal to the world and to ourselves. The neat trick this National Book Award finalist pulls is to balance the stories of McCullers and Shapland. In particular, she becomes obsessed by evidence McCullers was, like Shapland, a lesbian - evidence that previous biographers ignored. Jenn Shapland stumbles upon McCullers' papers at the University of Texas and intends to write about the 'The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter' novelist while staying at the famous Yaddo retreat for artists, where McCullers also did multiple stints.

This winter, if you read just one book that seems to be a biography but turns into an autobiography and is really about the writer clarifying her identity as a lesbian, I don't know what to tell you because 'Why Fish Don't Exist' is sensational but so is 'My Autobiography of Carson McCullers.'

Jenn shapland