Shapland also began to see her own experience-a childhood in a small town, struggles with chronic illness, evolving queer desire-reflected in the research. In McCullers’s photos, letters, and transcripts, formative relationships with these two women flicker just below the surface, never fully seeing the light of day. She also began to work through transcripts from McCullers’s therapy sessions with a woman named Mary Mercer. In these letters, Shapland saw a queer side of the Southern author, which has always been known but never explored in depth. She’d never read any of McCullers’s writing, but upon stumbling across a set of fiercely tender letters between the author and a woman named Annemarie Schwarzenbach, Shapland was transfixed. Her interest in the writer began in 2012, when she was interning at the Harry Ransom Center in Texas, where some of McCullers’s material is archived. Shapland’s memoir accomplishes this by weaving her own process of self-discovery with that of her subject. “To tell another person’s story,” she writes, “a writer must make that person some version of herself, must find a way to inhabit her.” The best of INDY Week’s fiercely independent journalism about the Triangle delivered straight to your inbox.
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