A Different Person

James Merrill’s memoir covers the two and a half years he spent in Europe in his mid-twenties, in analysis, in and out of love affairs, and trying to become a poet rather than a rich man’s son. He wrote it forty years later and interleaved the narrative with italicised passages from his own future, so the book keeps commenting on the person telling it. It won the PEN/Faulkner nomination and is among the most candid things he published.