Dwight Garner at the NYT:
“Carson McCullers: A Life” is a necessary book, though. It builds on Carr’s work and considers newly released material, including letters and journals and, most tantalizingly, transcripts of McCullers’s late-life psychiatric sessions with the female doctor who would become her lover and gatekeeper. It has been seven years since McCullers (1917-67) had her centennial, when the Library of America released her complete works in two volumes. That was an occasion, which many critics took, to revisit her work, which includes the novels “The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter” (1940) and “The Member of the Wedding” (1946), and the story collection “The Ballad of the Sad Café” (1951).
Special notice was paid, and justly so, to McCullers’s gifts for portraying loners and misfits, for addressing taboo topics such as mental illness and alcoholism and same-sex relationships. As Joyce Carol Oates put it in The New York Review of Books, “McCullers seemed to have identified with whatever is trans- in the human psyche, seeing it as the very fuel of desire.”
more here.