Margaret and the Mystery of the Missing Body Book

RELEASE DATE - 5 JANUARY 2021

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 woman named Annemarie. Though Shapland recognises herself in the letters, which are intimate and unabashed in their feelings, she does not see McCullers as history has portrayed her.

Her curiosity gives way to fixation, not just with this newly discovered side of McCullers's life, but with how we tell queer love stories. Why, Shapland asks, are the stories of women paved over by others' narratives? What happens when constant revision is required of queer women trying to navigate and self-actualise in straight spaces? And what might the tracing of McCullers's life--her history, her secrets, her legacy--reveal to Shapland about herself?

In smart, illuminating prose, Shapland interweaves her own story with McCullers's to create a vital new portrait of one of our nation's greatest literary treasures, and shows us how the writers we love and the stories we tell about ourselves make us who we are.

"Shapland herself has made a major contribution to the genre of autobiography."
The Phi Beta Kappa Society

"A truly brilliant approach to biography. Bold, brave and fascinating."
The Charlotte Observer

"My Autobiography Of Carson McCullers asks sharp questions not just about the details of McCullers' life but, more broadly, how we understand historical figures who confound the social expectations of their time (and our own) and how, in turn, they can help us understand ourselves."
NPR

"A beautiful consideration of the nature of proof, and of self and identity and queerness and history and progress."
Vox

"A beautifully written and hard-to-categorise meditation on Carson McCullers and the hidden literary history of queer women."
Literary Hub

"A fascinating and intimate examination of the work of archives, research and historic preservation as well as the arc of identity and social construction. . . . [an] idiosyncratic and entirely winning book."
Observer