Many of us find it appealing to visit the homes of writers, soaking up the atmosphere, getting a sense of the way they wrote, through their things. Shapland, an archivist, relates what she did and how she felt during her stay at McCullers’ house/museum in Columbus, Georgia, in preparation for writing this book. And even though I spent just one night in an apartment above the Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald Museum in Montgomery, Alabama, I understood (though while reading of McCullers’s home, I was reminded of Eudora Welty’s). After I thought of the Fitzgerald house, I came upon Shapland’s mention of visiting it once and her being disappointed because she thought it was Zelda’s childhood home and expected much more Zelda than she got. (My experience was different in that I felt Zelda was revealed to me there.) Shapland mentions that visit because growing up Zelda was the person she felt connected to until she “met” Carson (as she always refers to her).

Though I’ve read most of McCullers’s works, I didn’t know much of her personal life beyond what I gleaned from her fiction and the biographical emphasis on her two marriages to the same man. I’ve never been able to satisfactorily reconcile those two elements and after reading this, I now know why. McCullers didn’t closet herself, especially not in her later years, but apparently her official and unofficial biographers did.*

This isn’t a biography of McCullers. It’s Shapland’s memoir (see the title, though it should be subtitled A Memoir as other editions are) of how her affinity to McCullers grew, and how she herself became self-aware through the exploration of material in the archives where she worked. Her discovery of McCullers’ therapy transcripts, which McCullers hoped to shape into an autobiography before her untimely death, is instrumental to her insights. Some of McCullers’ clothes are in the archives and Shapland relates to those as well, understanding through them that feeling of “not masculine; not feminine, but a both that becomes other.”

The chapters are short and punchy, their titles meaningful. Judging by my highlights, my favorite chapter was ‘The High Line’ with its attempt to get a (historical) grip on the 2016 election. While reading this book, I was reminded of other memoir/genre-blending works I’ve read in recent years, especially [a:Carmen Maria Machado|6860265|Carmen Maria Machado|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1461618720p2/6860265.jpg]’s [b:In the Dream House|43317482|In the Dream House|Carmen Maria Machado|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1547869259l/43317482._SX50_.jpg|65787792].

*(See message 9 below for a further explanation.)

This book literally only has one thing going for it and that’s it made me start reading Carson McCullers. And that’s it. Reading this review, The Heart is A Lonely Hunter, and like The Argonauts will give u a much more pleasurable/well-rounded reading experience.

Being deeply interested in projects that queer the archives and reclaim narratives, this book was a shot to my veins and set my brain on fire. Biographers and history sought to erase McCullers’s chronic illness and her love of women but Shapland inserted herself and her own experience of her sexuality and with POTS into the narrative and the archive to shine a light on what is undeniable. This is genre-defying narrative non-fiction of the highest order. I want someone to do exactly this with Dorothy Porter (different I know as she wasn’t closeted but still).