Analysis of information sources in references of the Wikipedia article "James Merrill" in English language version.
She made that view explicit in Familiar Spirits: A Memoir of James Merrill and David Jackson, which appeared in 2001, six years after Merrill's death and shortly before Jackson's. It describes their Ouija board experience as a game that got badly out of control, until they couldn't tell what was real and what was not. According to her, the board became a form of self-induced demonic possession, to which Merrill, driven by his ambition to make poetry out of spirit messages, was especially susceptible, and in which Jackson was enlisted against his will. For evidence, she quotes passages from The Changing Light at Sandover, as if the trilogy were a factual record of their seances rather than a poetic fiction based on them. "As I read through the last two-thirds of the book," she writes, "I sometimes had the feeling that my friend's mind" -Merrill's mind- "was intermittently being taken over by a stupid and possibly even evil intelligence."
