Jenn Shapland’s My Autobiography of Carson McCullers is best described as a piece of braided nonfiction. There’s a call to create, a response, and a responsibility. In the hands of a writer or filmmaker (see Todd Haynes’s new The Velvet Underground or Angelo Madsen Minax’s astonishing North by Current), there’s a collaborative relationship between creator and archivist negotiating with the past to curate and contextualize. And it is through the use of archives that hidden lives are made public, celebrated, or obscured. Archives and archivists’ work shimmer with frisson: the tension between the public and the personal, the privilege of accessing someone’s most private selves. In my conversations with students interested in librarianship, I have noted a shared awe regarding archival work and assembly.
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