Reviews
Prior to publication, My Autobiography of Carson McCullers was named one of the most anticipated queer books of the Year by Lit Hub, [7] BuzzFeed, [8] Forbes , [9] Electric Literature , [10] [11] and Oprah Magazine . [12]
Following publication, the book received positive reviews from Booklist, [13] Kirkus Reviews , [14] The New York Times Book Review , [15] The A.V. Club , [16] Los Angeles Review of Books , [17] The Times , [18] Full Stop, [19] The New York Review of Books , [20] The Georgia Review , [21] Star Tribune , [22] The Rumpus , [23] Lambda Literary, [24] Autostraddle , [25] Library Journal , [26] The New Yorker , [27] and Open Letters Review. [28]
In various reviews, the book was called "revelatory", [29] "stimulating", [15] "gorgeous, brilliant", and "a moving record of love at the margins". [27] The New York Review of Books referred to it as "part fan letter, part detective story, and part steely corrective". [15]
The Los Angeles Times [30] and The New Republic [31] offered mixed reviews.
The Guardian 's Rachel Cook provided a poor review, saying, "My Autobiography of Carson McCullers, as its too-clever-by-half-sounding title implies, is neither memoir nor biography... such a declaration cannot disguise the fact that her (over) identification with McCullers takes us nowhere that is very productive." [32] In a similarly disappointed review, Publishers Weekly said, "Shapland’s intermingled autobiography and biography of McCullers’s life unsatisfyingly blurs what is real and what is imagined." [33]
