PERHAPS A GIFT VOUCHER FOR MUM?: MOTHER'S DAY
Jenn Shapland's work won a 2017 Pushcart Prize and fellowships/residencies at Ucross, the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum, Yaddo, the Carson McCullers Center for Writers and Musicians and Vermont Studio Center. Her essays have been published in Tin House, THE Magazine, Pastelegram, The Lifted Brow, Electric Literature, NANOfiction and The Millions. She teaches in the Creative Writing department at the Institute of American Indian Arts and has a PhD in English from UT Austin. She designs and makes clothing for Agnes. She lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Weird and un-categorisable (in a good way) * Guardian (Nonfiction to look out for in 2021) * Weaves together biography and memoir . . . Shards of the author's own life glitter amid the story of McCullers's triumphs and struggles . . . A lively cast of walk-on characters includes Tennessee Williams, Elizabeth Bowen, Edith Sitwell and Robert Lowell . . . But it is Shapland's identification with her subject that energises the book . . . Only an accomplished writer could marshal this tricky material in order to enmesh two stories. The reader sees McCullers afresh in these pages . . . The politics of female queerness are central to this book, and Shapland handles the subject adroidy. At the same time, this volume, which I admire and recommend without reservation, speaks clearly and universally of the human heart, and specifically of the human heart in conflict with itself -- Sara Wheeler * Literary Review * The truth about Carson McCullers, the great American gothic writer, is finally told . . . What makes this such an unusual work, far removed from conventional biography, is that it's as much Shapland's story as it is McCullers's. In the process of recasting McCullers, Shapland finds her own identity . . . My Autobiography of Carson McCullers is the result: impeccably young, modern and fresh, an assertion of lesbian liberation. Political and at times polemical, it's a call to arms to reappraise past lives . . . beautifully and sparsely written -- Melanie Reid * The Times (Ireland) * A very interesting and innovative work * Irish Times *
