Text from The Member of the Wedding was used by Jarvis Cocker on his debut album, Jarvis. It forms the introduction to the 11th song on the album, "Big Julie", and consists of his re-writing of the opening lines of the book. In the original these are:
It happened that green and crazy summer when Frankie was twelve years old. This was the summer when for a long time she had not been a member. She belonged to no club and was a member of nothing in the world. Frankie had become an unjoined person who hung around in doorways, and she was afraid.
The poet Sylvia Plath was known to admire McCullers' work, and the unusual phrase "silver and exact", used by McCullers to describe a set of train tracks in the novel, is the first line of Plath's poem "Mirror".