SOURCE: “The Trillings: A Marriage of True Minds?,” in Salmagundi, No. 103, Summer, 1994, pp. 213-24.

In the following review, Krupnick finds The Beginning of the Journey self-serving and harshly critical of Lionel Trilling yet maintains that it is Diana Trilling's best book.

Since the death of Lionel Trilling in 1975, Diana Trilling has come into her own as a writer. Claremont Essays (1964), a collection of pieces from the previous two decades, had borne the stamp of her intellectual collaboration with Lionel, but Mrs. Trilling's 1981 book on Jean Harris, the spurned lover and murderer of the Scarsdale Diet doctor Herman Tarnower, was hers alone. It was clearly not the kind of project Lionel Trilling would ever have undertaken.

On the basis of Mrs. Trilling's development as a writer, I had half-expected that this memoir The Beginning of the Journey of her first 20 years with Lionel would claim that in the beginning...