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Books The Member of the Wedding

Small in scope, as intense as Frankie Addams’s fevered imagination, The Member of the Wedding is magical in effect, properly an American classic. Its mixture of comedy, pathos and tragedy (for there is a shock of an ending, beyond Frankie’s personal humiliation) is rendered with such seeming effortlessness, one might be inclined to call it ‘artless’. There is no higher praise.

Tweet this quote Read the full piece at London Review of Books Joyce Carol Oates London Review of Books 1999
Berenice is a profoundly impressive character. Miss McCullers can continue to create similar ones and, like Dostoievsky, place them in a situation where their very grotesqueness takes on symbolic value, American literature may find itself with a really important writer on its hands.

Tweet this quote Joseph Frank The Sewanee Review 1946

In those opening lines to one of her most famous works, ‘The Member of the Wedding, Carson McCullers articulates the theme that would preoccupy her throughout her career: the apprehension of separateness experienced by introspective individuals and their yearning for some sort of connection with the world of others.

Tweet this quote Read the full piece at New York Times Michiko Kakutani New York Times 1987

I remember this book for, more than its characters or plot, that vivid feeling of wanting to belong expressed so convincingly.

— Brian Flanagan