Why am I passionate about this?
Judith Jones became an important mentor and mother figure to me in my twenties, in the wake of my parents’ deaths. Her personal wisdom and guidance, which I received both in knowing her personally and from the incredible archive she left behind, have been invaluable to me during a particularly tumultuous and transformative decade in my own life. I wrote The Editor as I was coming into my full adulthood, and the books on this list helped shape my thinking along the way at times when I felt stagnant or stuck or needed to rethink both how to write Judith’s life and why her story is so vital to tell.
Sara's book list on the stories we tell about women
Why did Sara love this book?
This book fundamentally reshaped my notion of how biography–especially biographies of women–can be written. Shapland felt intimately connected to McCullers as a person and as a writer and also had an inkling there was more to her personhood than previous biographical treatments suggest.
By inhabiting McCullers’s spaces and putting herself in proximity to the writer’s material past, Shapland demonstrates the ways in which convention has limited both the stories we tell and, thus, the possibilities we can envision for our lives as women.
2 authors picked My Autobiography of Carson McCullers as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
Winner of the Publishing Triangle Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction, Phi Beta Kappa Christian Gauss Award, and a Lambda Literary Award
Finalist for the National Book Award
Longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction
How do you tell the real story of someone misremembered—an icon and idol—alongside your own? Jenn Shapland’s celebrated debut is both question and answer: an immersive, surprising exploration of one of America’s most beloved writers, alongside a genre-defying examination of identity, queerness, memory, obsession, and love.
Shapland is a graduate student when she first uncovers letters written to Carson McCullers by a…