My Autobiography of Carson Mccullers

A beautifully crafted memoir, which entangles the author's exploration of Carson McCullers' queer life and archives with her own coming to terms with her identity both as a writer and as a lesbian. It's tender and precise and full of care about what it means to read and interpret the past when you long for traces of queer history as you examine your own changing self. The book unfolds in a constant wondering about queer understandings of love, reciprocity and creativity that have existed before and which you may (or may not) be able to recover in the interstices of the literary and art canon. A big fan of McCullers myself, I wasn't disappointed!

Queer woman realizes and accepts her queerness while uncovering the traces of McCullers’s long-denied queerness during her work on McC’s archives. It’s just great. Beautiful reflections on being queer, on queer legibility, on what archives are and how they work, and what being a writer in the world means.

Infused with longing and written with an eye for poetry, this is a personal exploration of the boundary between love and possession: between lovers, between queer people and communities not ready to accept them, between a long-dead author and her biographer. I found it thought-provoking, sad, and in some ways, triumphant: a suppressed love story finally taking flight. May we all have the courage and the freedom to be and love as ourselves.