MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF CARSON McCULLERS

By Jenn Shapland

In Carson McCullers’s 1946 novel “The Member of the Wedding,” 12-year-old Frankie Addams, a motherless girl growing up in small-town Georgia, is jolted by news of her older brother’s engagement. Hoping to join his wedding as something a great deal more than a spectator or bridesmaid, she plans to accompany the bride and groom on their honeymoon.

McCullers’s third and best-known novel tends to be misremembered as a sweeter affair than it is. A lonely misfit in shorts and a sombrero, precocious yet naïve, Frankie is grappling with a self she doesn’t quite know and longings she can’t name. She spends her days largely alone, shunned by other girls, but at the circus she avoids “the Freaks, for it seemed to her that they had looked at her in a secret way.” Part of the novel’s emotional undertow is the sense that Frankie’s isolation, her desire to belong — to someone, to someplace — is unlikely to end with adolescence. “I suppose this book is my autobiography,” McCullers wrote to a lover after she completed it.

Outsiderness was McCullers’s great theme, one that’s inextricable from the quest for identity and self-definition, and while none of her protagonists were out of the closet, it’s hard to read her work now and not see queerness as a central part. It was her identification with people ill at ease in themselves that made them so relatable to so many. It is also what led some critics to write that McCullers was “before her time,” that most banal and patronizing of descriptors.

In fact, she was very much of her time, often painfully so. As Jenn Shapland recounts in her rousing and tautly written new book, “My Autobiography of Carson McCullers,” McCullers struggled with the novel for years trying to understand Frankie. It was surely a similar craving for socially sanctioned love that drove McCullers to marry — disastrously, twice — the same troubled man, Reeves McCullers. Only in the last decade of the author’s life (she died at 50), when she began therapy and fell in love with her psychologist, Mary Mercer, was she able to call herself a lesbian.