SOURCE: Corn, Alfred. “Merrill Table Talk.” Nation 273, no. 6 (20 April 2001): 28.

In the following review, Corn offers a negative assessment of Familiar Spirits, noting that the memoir focuses too heavily on Lurie's personal gripes with James Merrill.

Describing Alison Lurie's fiction as a decades-long debate with James Merrill explains a lot about her and, by extension, American culture in general. This memoir, [Familiar Spirits,] her second work of nonfiction, tells how they met in the mid-1950s, Lurie the bored, intelligent faculty wife of a dullish junior English professor at Amherst, Merrill a visiting teacher of poetry writing. Lurie says that he paid to have her first book privately printed, a memoir of their friend V. R. Lang, which led to the publication of Lurie's first novel Love and Friendship. She acknowledges that her novel includes a character combining traits drawn from Merrill and from his companion David Jackson, though...