Summary
McCullers defined "illumination" as inspiration and insight; "night glare" referred to her many illnesses and periods of writer's block. She left this manuscript at her death in 1967: an incomplete pastiche of events and opinions from McCullers's life, including the suicide of her husband, her evaluations of other writers, and her own creative sources-particularly an outline of her first novel that vividly illustrates her disciplined writing techniques. McCullers writes, "I think it is important for future generations...to know why I did certain things, but it is also important for myself....I became an established literary figure overnight, and I was much too young to understand what happened to me....Perhaps if I trace and preserve for future generations the effect this success had on me it will prepare future artists to accept it better."
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Media Reviews
"[T]here are frequent passages of interest, and one can see why an editor would want to present the attenuated manuscript for publication, for it is all that remains of the unpublished work....[I]t is nostalgic, highly subjective and uncritical. It would be unfair to expect a more rigorous self-examination by a woman so severely afflicted. But if this memoir leads a new generation of readers back to McCullers, it will have more than justified its publication." -- Joyce Carol Oates
-- London Review of Books
"Regardless of its limitations, this autobiography was a heroic last-ditch effort. It might have been a very different book if McCullers had lived to finish it." -- Phoebe-Lou Adams
-- Atlantic Monthly
"Much of what [McCullers] recounts is painful....But she remains remarkably detached [and] in the end, her fiction tells us much more about her lonely heart than her devious autobiography does." -- Catherine Saint Louis
-- New York Times Book Review
"What gives the book its singular tension is the conflict between McCullers's desire to present herself as one of those eccentric, gabby, reckless, free-spirited Southern ladies who have...reached the point where they'll say anything, and our own growing realization that McCullers has spent a good deal of that lifetime in hell....At once garrulous and secretive, self-mythologizing and hair-raisingly honest, ILLUMINATION AND NIGHT GLARE shines its deceptively cheerful brights on the scarred and damaged recesses of its author's psyche." -- Francine Prose
-- Bookforum
Bibliographic Details
Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Pr
Published date: 2002
Size: 6 x 9 inches
Weight: 0.75 pounds
Other Editions
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