Top Qs
Timeline
Chat
Perspective
My Autobiography of Carson McCullers
2020 book by Jenn Shapland From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Remove ads
My Autobiography of Carson McCullers is a memoir by Jenn Shapland, published April 2, 2020 by Tin House Books. In 2021, the book won the Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction,[1] the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Memoir,[2] and the Phi Beta Kappa Christian Gauss Award.[3] Along with being longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction,[4] it was a finalist for the National Book Award for Nonfiction[5] and a Stonewall Book Award Honor Book.[6]
Remove ads
Reception
Summarize
Perspective
Reviews
Prior to publication, My Autobiography of Carson McCullers was named one of the most anticipated queer books of the Year by Lit Hub,[7] Buzzfeed,[8] Forbes,[9] Electric Literature,[10][11] and Oprah Magazine.[12]
Following publication, the book received positive reviews from Booklist,[13] Kirkus Reviews,[14] The New York Times Book Review,[15] The A.V. Club,[16] Los Angeles Review of Books,[17] The Times,[18] Full Stop,[19] The New York Review of Books,[20] The Georgia Review,[21] Star Tribune,[22] The Rumpus,[23] Lambda Literary,[24] Autostraddle,[25] Library Journal,[26] The New Yorker,[27] and Open Letters Review.[28]
In various reviews, the book was called "revelatory",[29] "stimulating",[15] "gorgeous, brilliant", and "a moving record of love at the margins".[27] The New York Review of Books referred to it as "part fan letter, part detective story, and part steely corrective".[15]
The Los Angeles Times[30] and The New Republic[31] offered mixed reviews.
The Guardian's Rachel Cook provided a poor review, saying, "My Autobiography of Carson McCullers, as its too-clever-by-half-sounding title implies, is neither memoir nor biography... such a declaration cannot disguise the fact that her (over) identification with McCullers takes us nowhere that is very productive."[32] In a similarly disappointed review, Publishers Weekly said, "Shapland’s intermingled autobiography and biography of McCullers’s life unsatisfyingly blurs what is real and what is imagined."[33]
Awards
Remove ads
References
Wikiwand - on
Seamless Wikipedia browsing. On steroids.
Remove ads