The Member of the Wedding by Carson McCullers

This is a book perfectly suited to readers who wrote off The Bell Jar as lightweight, plot-driven entertainment.Īwkward and lanky, like McCullers herself, Frankie is obsessed with the idea of 'membership': other girls mock her height, asking her if it's 'cold up there', and exclude her from the local clubhouse where they party with boys. When something that might be construed as 'action' does finally occur, it's shockingly dark: an incident involving a soldier who mistakenly believes Frankie to be much older than she is. Much of the activity is interior – either inside Frankie's head, or in the kitchen, where she tells her family's black cook, Berenice, of her plans to leave town with Janice and Jarvis. But if the book is a female Catcher in the Rye for the American south, it's a very downtempo, febrile one.

With its portrait of pre-teen awkwardness and self-delusion, The Member Of The Wedding has attracted youthful fans. Close inspection reveals it most definitely isn't. It's an innocent, twinkling kind of backstory to accompany what could, from a distance, seem like an innocent, twinkling kind of book. On hearing a fire engine's siren, McCullers and Rose Lee gave chase through the streets, and McCullers had a sudden epiphany about the central concept of her book, which tells of a 12 year-old girl, Frankie, who is so in love with her brother, Jarvis, and his wife, Janice, that she thinks she can join them on their honeymoon. Paul and Jane Bowles, Gypsy Rose Lee, WH Auden and Benjamin Britten all slept at the house regularly, and it was during her time there, after a boozy Thanksgiving dinner, that the spark for her third novel, The Member Of The Wedding, was lit. During McCullers' separation from Reeves, she took refuge in a communal house in Brooklyn that was almost too literary to be true.

The Member of the Wedding by Carson McCullers