In truth, Shapland’s book has very little to do with McCullers, as woman or writer, and everything to do with Shapland’s own story. It’s just that they are housed within another narrative: the straight narrative”. Shapland acknowledges that “many of the details of Carson’s lesbian life are right there, in plain sight. McCullers’s lesbianism and gender non-conforming behaviours might have been spoken about in limited circles during her lifetime, but that hasn’t been the case for a long time and if, as suggested by Shapland, biographers have sanitised the story of McCullers’s sexuality, then there are many more scholars who have not. The reader who knows little about Carson McCullers might easily assume that Jenn Shapland’s memoir is ground-breaking in exposing McCullers, once celebrated as the new Steinbeck, as a closet lesbian: “If Carson was a lesbian, and if her relationships bore that out, wouldn’t someone already have said so? Wouldn’t it be known beyond rumours in the queer community?”
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