fml: how Carson McCullers saved my life

Jo’s junior year of high school in suburban LaGrange, Illinois started off just fine–not that it’s ever easy being queer at 16. Thankfully, a new English teacher assigns Carson McCullers’ famed novel The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter and Jo discovers an unshakable kinship to McCullers’ central character John Singer. Like Singer, Jo is forever the listener, definitively the outsider, perpetually misunderstood and filled with unrequited love. Yet when she is a victim of a gay-bashing incident, her world is turned upside down and she must decide whether to seek revenge or redemption. A story about isolation, fitting in and finding oneself, fml: how Carson McCullers saved my life is a play about surviving high school and how literature still has the power to transform how we see the world.