In My Autobiography of Carson McCullers, Shapland purposefully combines the genres of autobiography and biography, leading to the extraordinary pun-or perhaps slip of the tongue-in the title. Now, more than thirty years later, Heilbrun’s work provides a useful frame to consider Jenn Shapland’s new book, My Autobiography of Carson McCullers, and to examine strategies for writing a lesbian’s life in both the past and the present. Heilbrun describes four ways to write a woman’s life: autobiography, fiction, biography, and an unnamed way in which “the woman may write her own life in advance of living it, unconsciously, and without recognizing or naming the process.” Bringing insights from feminist scholarship to the daily lives of women, Heilbrun transforms the genre of biography and autobiography as an attempt “to reinvent the lives their subjects led, discovering from what evidence they could find the processes and decisions, the choices and unique pain, that lay beyond the life stories.” Desiring to break the narratives that constrain women’s lives-accounts of obeisance, servility, and marriage-Heilbrun argues that in the late 1980s the nature of stories about women’s lives was changing and needed even more change so that women could imagine a wide range of possible plots-and by extension a wide range of opportunities for their lives. In her ground-breaking, best-selling book Writing a Woman’s Life (1988), feminist Carolyn G.
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