As I searched through the existing writings about Carson in my downtime as an intern at the Harry Ransom Center, I found over and over that her relationship with Annemarie was sidelined or left out of a story about her and Reeves. It doesn’t seem as if these are, for the most part, acts of outright censorship on the part of biographers or the people they interviewed. Many of the details of Carson’s lesbian life are right there, in plain sight. It’s just that they are housed within another narrative: the straight narrative, the one in which inexplicable crushes on and friendships with women surface briefly within the confines of an otherwise “normal” life. In the published biographies, Annemarie is just a one-sided obsession. (“Carson loved Annemarie far more than Annemarie could ever requite,” according to Virginia Spencer Carr’s The Lonely Hunter, and “Annemarie did not return Carson’s enthusiasm,” writes Sherill Tippins in February House.) The more I read, the more it seemed that all of her profound emotional relationships with women were either dismissed or ridiculed. Her therapist (and probable lover), Mary Mercer, becomes in these retellings some kind of nursemaid to a sickly, emotionally flatulent Carson, and the other significant women in Carson’s life—Mary Tucker, Elizabeth Ames, Janet Flanner, Natalia Danesi Murray, Marielle Bancou, Gypsy Rose Lee, Jane Bowles—all become minor characters.
Yet as I read and reread her letters and conversations with Mercer, I found a fuller version of Carson’s life revealed through her relationships. I am more convinced than ever that we are shards of others. Through her relationships with other women, I can trace the evidence of Carson’s becoming, as a woman, as a lesbian, and as a writer. There are so many crushes in a lifetime, so many friendships that mix desiring to have with wanting to be. It’s the combination of wants that makes these longings confusing, dangerous, and queer. There is a desire to know that is already knowing, a curiosity for what you deep down recognize, a lust for what you are or could be. Writer Richard Lawson describes it as “the muddied confusion over whether you want to be someone’s companion or if you want to step inside their skin, to inhabit the world as they do.”