Familiar Spirits is a memoir published in 2000 by American writer Alison Lurie. In it, she recounts a friendship with poet James Merrill and his life partner David Jackson which began in the 1950s.
Merrill and Jackson were both wealthy, well-educated men, who lived an openly gay life decades before that was common. Together, the two men spent many years gathering Ouija board messages during séances, a fact of which Lurie was made aware of early on, and about which she never lost her early skepticism. For Merrill, the poetic result was a 560-page apocalyptic epic called The Changing Light at Sandover (1982), which is in large measure transcribed from supernatural voices. In Familiar Spirits, Lurie attempts to provide several rational and mundane explanations for Merrill and Jackson's epiphanies and revelations.
Famous quotes containing the words familiar and/or spirits:
“All the familiar horrors we
Associate with others
Are coming fast along our way:
The wind is warning in our tree
And morning papers still betray
The shrieking of the mothers.”
—Philip Larkin (1922–1986)
“Rational free spirits are the light brigade who go on ahead and reconnoitre the ground which the heavy brigade of the orthodox will eventually occupy.”
—G.C. (Georg Christoph)