Familiar Spirits: A Memoir of James Merrill and David Jackson Paperback – February 26, 2002

This is a great read, with rich commentary not just about Merrill and Jackson, but about the challenges of writing a memoir. Highly recommended.

Lurie writes a very carefully rendered and bittersweet record of a friendship that was fraught with love, frustration, complexity, and disappointment. She's modest and thoughtful -- nothing like the caricature depicted in some of the comments here of a person inserting herself into the lives of others. In fact, while I've taken a more sympathetic (and less intimate) perspective on Merrill and Jackson's use of a Ouija board, Lurie provides an extremely important, up-close narrative. I read this book more than five years ago and still think of some of its passages today. That's quite rare for any memoir and speaks to the book's depths.

A memoir is not a biography, as Lurie reminds us at the beginning of her book. One should be grateful for the revelations that are given, and there are many. Perhaps one should be cheered by seeing the sort of defensiveness a beloved author can arouse, but if the reviewers picked up the book they presumably wanted to "get inside," and that is where Lurie takes us. Who wants the sugar-coated anyway? Lurie opens a door on a rather Gothic menage, a very energized and energizing union, which dilapidated all too predictably into disunion and the cliched gay search for May-December love on the Greek travel plan. She writes with candor, but acknowledges the many missing spaces, temporal and informational lacunae, in her decades of friendship with these fellow authors. Her critical exegesis of the poetry is quite good for a novelist unpracticed in such analysis, and she raises some fair, troubling questions about the content of "Sandover." The Ouija board seemingly acted as a tap for the unconscious thoughts and wishes of its authors, and we find some of these messages, not all of which are palatable, give one insight into the infrastructure of creative sensibility. Ugliness and egotism are part and parcel. Overall, Merrill and Jackson are depicted as serious, generous artists who immeasurably enriched the lives of those around them. Of course, there are faults too, some of them egregious. Several reviewers acknowledge--rather ungraciously--the veracity of Lurie's claim that Merrill's "The Changing Light at Sandover" was produced jointly by Merrill and Jackson, via their rather Dantean peregrinations on the Ouija board. I would ask the Merrill idolators this: if J.M. himself could acknowledge David Jackson as co-creator of "Sandover" in subsequent interviews, why could he not put his lifelong lover's name on the spine of the Pulitzer-winning volume? The charges in other reviews that Lurie is magnifying her own reputation through her friendship with Merrill are shallow and spurious; there is not a single self-aggrandizing sentence in the entire volume, and that is a first for the many memoirs I have read. If anything, Lurie is self-deprecating and respectful of the rigors and liabilities of the artistic life. This book is not the typical memoir but a serious and respectful study of two artistic souls locked in a Narcissus-embrace which ended--as it must--with the mirror permanently distorted.

I was drawn to this book by a Ouija Board. (Kidding.) Actually, I was fascinated by the story of two writers who decided to contact spirits of dead poets, or whoever came through, by using an overturned teacup instead of the usual planchette and a Ouija Board. Ms. Lurie's memoir drew me in quite quickly and kept my interest throughout the story of these two men with her dry, but engrossing, style as well as an insider's understanding of a pair of friends she loved throughout their lives. It's a small book, a quick read, but stuffed with the kind of trenchant observations I find fascinating when it comes to the writing of biographies. Initially unaware of James Merrill and David Jackson, I was more interested in the dynamics of their relationship as it progressed from the 50s to the 90s. Although the resulting "channeled" poetry wasn't exactly my, um, cup of tea, I still enjoyed the brevity of her style and the quality of her insight.

Wonderful story - only that, like Merrill & his companion, the author got lost in the Ouija board stuff so I had to skip about 50 pages!

This is a beautifully written long view of the lives of James Merrill, poet, and his lover and uncredited collaborator David Jackson. They dabbled through the ouija board in contact with unseen spirits that supposedly provided the material for Merrill's largest poetic works. The cost to both men of this eerie devotion is trenchantly narrated by Alison Lurie, their friend of many years. The charge that Ms. Lurie is using her connection to Merrill to enhance her own reputation is absurd, as she is far more well known in general than Merrill.