SOURCE: Marks, Jim. “Uncommon Friends.” Washington Post Book World (11 February 2001): 12.

In the following review, Marks praises Familiar Spirits, judging the book to be an honest and skillful memoir of poet James Merrill and his partner David Jackson.

A faint whiff of vindication almost inevitably attends Familiar Spirits, Pulitzer prize-winning novelist Alison Lurie's totally absorbing memoir of her friends poet James Merrill and his longtime companion, writer and artist David Jackson. After all, she is at some pains to depict herself at the beginning of their friendship, in the mid-1950s, as an ordinary Amherst faculty wife struggling with the ordinary tribulations of limited funds, young children and an academic world in which women are valued primarily (and not too highly) for their skill in advancing their husbands' careers.

In such a world, Merrill and Jackson were anything but ordinary. They were both rich—Merrill, the son of Charles...