The Member of the Wedding/A Christmas Memory by Carson McCullers/Truman Capote

The Member of the Wedding focuses on the search and struggle that Frankie, the protagonist, experiences in successfully navigating the treacherous waters of adolescence. This story is set in a small, somewhat impoverished town. Frankie, a young, lower-middle class girl, lives with her widowed father. She is desperate to belong to something significant and uses her older brother’s wedding as an opportunity to do that. Themes that adolescents can identify with are acceptance and self-actualization.

Truman Capote’s memoir shows a narrator who is engaged in a struggle to find a place to belong and to be a member—even if that place is only with an elderly cousin who seems not to fit in any place herself. The action takes place in a small Southern town around the time of the Great Depression. Capote uses themes of love, acceptance, and loyalty in A Christmas Memory.

About the Series:

Novel/Drama curriculum units contain complete lesson plans with preliminary and follow-up work, teacher notes with plot summary, background, and rationale, ready-to-use worksheets, and suggested answers for student questions. These study guides encourage the development of thinking, reading, speaking, research, and writing skills as well as critical thinking skills such as analysis, synthesis, and evaluation.