Sunday book pick: Being young and bored in Carson McCullers’s novel ‘The Member of the Wedding’

“It looks like to me everything has just walked off and left me.”

Twelve-year-old Frankie Addams has never felt so lonely in her life. Motherless, her father too busy at the jewellery shop, her brother away in the army, Frankie spends the hot summer months with her six-year-old first cousin John Henry and the family maid Berenice. A tomboy and a misfit, Frankie is so in love with her brother and his bride – Jarvis and Janice – that she has all but made up her mind to run away from her “hideous” house and join them in not just their wedding, but also the honeymoon.

A kid who has probably freshly hit puberty, Frankie thinks of herself as an “unjoined person” who is not a member of any club – not at home, not outside. She is less than pleased about being left behind with her young cousin and their black maid. Though she is well looked after, her lonely existence at home is doing little to stimulate her intellectually or creatively. And Berenice’s patronising attitude isn’t helping either. She cannot see Frankie as the adult she claims to be – she is advised to not be foolish and throw tantrums about being...

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