A Different Person

“As in his poetry, Merrill’s writing is rigorous, with a high aesthetic polish, yet also deeply intimate and funny.” —The New Yorker “Merrill’s prose style [is] a smooth composite of wit, elegance, and grace.” —San Francisco Chronicle “Absorbing, intelligent, and tender. . . . [Merrill] has a Proustian awareness of time and of the bittersweet perceptions and misunderstandings that the young and old bear for one another. . . . Merrill’s prose, like his poetry, is eloquent and elegant.” —Philadelphia Inquirer “What emerge in these pages is a portrait of a young aesthete, devoted to opera, to poetry, but above else to himself. . . . Its graceful prose and wistful, almost elegiac, tone contribute to an overall sense of wisdom geared from experience.” —The Plain Dealer “Elegant and perspicuous.” —The Boston Book Review “Merrill . . . is a national treasure. . . . A canny and innovative approach to memoir as a form. . . . This burnished and inventive memoir shows him as one of its contemporary masters.” —The American Spectator “Compelling. . . . Beautifully written with insights into love and passion. . . . Merrill’s prose is nacreous, with some of the finest pearls concealed in subordinate phrases and incidental figures of speech.” —The Washington Post Book World' “The most dazzlingly paradoxical writer in contemporary American poetry and prose. . . . This memoir traces James Merrill’s sometimes painful but aways hilarious efforts to trade in the family drama for the human comedy.” —Edmund White