Storyweb: Storytime For Grownups

This week on StoryWeb: Carson McCullers’s novel The Member of the Wedding. This episode is dedicated to Suzanne Custer. Here’s a writer whose work has much too unfortunately fallen out of popularity. Carson McCullers made a splash in the literary world in 1940 with her first novel, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, and her 1951 novella, The Ballad of the Sad Café, has also gotten lots of attention. But my favorite of her books is her 1946 novel, The Member of the Wedding. Jasmine Addams – or Frankie, as she is known by her family – is 12 years old, right on the brink of young adulthood. She is literally poised between childhood and adulthood. During the summer the novel takes place, Frankie is very much in that liminal space. McCullers says, “This was the summer when for a long time she had not been a member. She belonged to no club and was a member of nothing in the world. Frankie had become an unjoined person who hung around in doorways, and she was afraid.” I love the upstart Frankie. She is what my friend A