The Member of the Wedding is a 1946 novel by Southern writer Carson McCullers. It took McCullers five years to complete (though she interrupted the work for a few months to write the short novel The Ballad of the Sad Cafe).
In a letter to her husband Reeves McCullers, she explained that the novel was "one of those works that the least slip can ruin. It must be beautifully done. For like a poem there is not much excuse for it otherwise."
She originally planned to write a story about a girl who is in love with her piano teacher, but she had what she called "a divine spark: "Suddenly I said: Frankie is in love with her brother and the bride... The illumination focused the whole book."
Read more about The Member Of The Wedding: Plot, Critical Interpretations, Adaptations, References in Popular Culture
Famous quotes containing the word member:
“One of the most highly valued functions of used parents these days is to be the villains of their children’s lives, the people the child blames for any shortcomings or disappointments. But if your identity comes from your parents’ failings, then you remain forever a member of the child generation, stuck and unable to move on to an adulthood in which you identify yourself in terms of what you do, not what has been done to you.”
—Frank Pittman (20th century)