SOURCE: Holleran, Andrew. “Shrimp Bisque and Yellow Underpants.” Lambda Book Report 9, no. 8 (March 2001): 21.

In the following review, Holleran contends that Familiar Spirits is a revealing and honest recounting of Lurie's friendship with David Jackson and James Merrill.

Most of us want the marriages of our friends to be perfect. This, of course, includes gay couples. We like to visit the happy pair, soak up their hospitality, use them as a point of stability in our lives. Yet we can never know the backstage scenes and bargains, the real dynamic behind the facade that married couples, especially when they happen to be our hosts, construct to charm us; and that is, among other things, the subject of Alison Lurie's Familiar Spirits: A Memoir of James Merrill and David Jackson that recounts her friendship over several decades with the poet, who died in 1995, and his partner David Jackson, who still...