Carson McCullers

One was I had a fascination with, I'll just say, the tomboy novel when I was a teenager.

I loved Shirley Jackson, and I loved Carson McCullers.

And I liked a couple of examples in science fiction of the Tom girl novel, like Robert Heinlein has this book, Pod Kane of Mars.

And so True Grit just suddenly, the first time I spotted it, I was like, oh, well, that's for me.

And many other gothic writers have done the same thing.

Now Carson McCullers, she made readers look at the loneliness and exclusion beneath ordinary community life.

Barbara Bainton challenged the heroic story of the Australian bush by showing us the women that largely had been pushed aside.

Neither writer needed to give us a long explanation of what was wrong with the accepted narrative, they made us see the people who didn't fit inside that narrative.

In a course I recently taught on Southern Gothic literature, I gave my students an exercise.

They were tasked with prompting AI to analyze the emotional atmosphere of a scene from Carson McCullers' 1940 novel, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter.

Many of the characters readers meet in Southern Gothic works like McCullers are freakish and brutal.

Rendered from a distorted, unnatural lens, they speak in odd dialects and conjure what Flannery O'Connor called the grotesque.

And if you were able to spend time with any writer of your choice, living or dead, and ask them about their experience of being a writer, who would it be?

Well, I love Carson McCullers, but I also love my friend writers, you know, Katherine Marie.

I love talking to her about writing.

Katherine Johns and, um- I love Joseph Roth.

Well, I have a question, actually, because you gave a wonderful interview to the Irish Times, I think, in March when your book first came out.

And you mentioned that you love Carson McCullers.

Yes, that's there.

I can see that.

Beautiful photograph in the

front.

You know, my brother is a writer and he told me that when he read this novel, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers when he was a teenager, he realized that he can be a writer.

He wants to be a writer because there's music in how she writes, not just what she writes about, but the way the sentences, come together it's it's a kind of music it has a it has a rhythm it has a tempo it has a melody it's not just stating something or expressing defining something it actually has to flow in a musical sort of way as language and that's what made him want to become a writer why did you love that book

And I remember I was out running or kind of jogging on Clapham Common near where I live.

And I was listening to this podcast about this writer called Carson McCullers, who wrote this beautiful book called The Heart is a Lonely Hunter.

And she tried to take her life many times.

And she sadly died of alcoholism in her 50s.