Reading Order
The Temple of My Familiar Reading Order
The Temple of My Familiar (1989) by Alice Walker is her third novel and her most expansive — a vast, multi-stranded work that follows six main characters across three continents and half a million years of human history, including Suwelo, an American history professor; Carlotta, his wife; Arveyda, a musician; Zede, Arveyda's mother-in-law; Hal, an old man; and Miss Lissie, an ancient woman who claims to remember previous lives going back to the very beginning of human time. The novel's central philosophical argument is carried largely by Miss Lissie and her memories: Walker is attempting to tell an alternative history of human civilization from the perspective of women, of Africans, of the colonized — a history in which what the conventional historical record ignores or suppresses is the most important truth. The Temple of My Familiar is Walker's most ambitious and most divisive novel — some readers find its breadth exhilarating, others find its New Age elements and the scope of its argument too diffuse. The novel is also a companion to The Color Purple and to Possessing the Secret of Joy: Celie and Shug appear briefly; Adam and Tashi are central characters. The novel's engagement with African history, with the history of colonialism, with the spiritual lives of African people, and with the relationship between memory and identity makes it one of the most challenging and intellectually stimulating of Walker's works.
Where to start
Read The Color Purple (1982) first — The Temple of My Familiar is a companion that deepens the Color Purple's characters and world. Any Harcourt paperback. Readers who want the full Walker arc should then read Possessing the Secret of Joy (1992).
Complete The Temple of My Familiar Book List
- 1Buy
The Temple of My Familiar
Alice Walker·1989·The novel — six main characters across three continents; Miss Lissie's memories going back half a million years; Walker's alternative history of human civilization from the perspective of women and the colonized; the expansive companion to The Color Purple. - 2Buy
The Color Purple
Alice Walker·1982·Walker's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel — the essential predecessor; Celie, Shug, Adam, and Tashi all appear in The Temple of My Familiar, and the emotional weight of their appearances depends on knowing who they are. - 3Buy
Possessing the Secret of Joy
Alice Walker·1992·The companion novel — Tashi's story continued; the companion in Walker's extended fictional world; should be read after both The Color Purple and The Temple of My Familiar. - 4Buy
Meridian
Alice Walker·1976·Walker's second novel — the companion in her fiction about African American women's political commitment; Meridian Hill is the predecessor to Miss Lissie in Walker's portrait of women who carry the weight of history. - 5Buy
Beloved
Toni Morrison·1987·Morrison's Nobel and Pulitzer Prize-winning novel — the companion in African American women's fiction about memory, the past, and the way history haunts the present; Miss Lissie's ancestral memories are the Walker companion to the way Beloved's ghost embodies Morrison's historical memory. - 6Buy
Roots
Alex Haley·1976·Haley's landmark work — the companion in the multigenerational African and African American historical narrative; where Walker imagines an alternative history through Miss Lissie's memories, Haley traces one family's actual history from West Africa to America. - 7Buy
Song of Solomon
Toni Morrison·1977·Morrison's breakthrough novel — the companion in African American fiction about the ancestral past and the meaning of African heritage for contemporary Black Americans; Milkman Dead's quest for his family's history is the companion to Miss Lissie's ancient memories. - 8Buy
The Fifth Sacred Thing
Starhawk·1993·Starhawk's visionary novel — the companion in feminist speculative fiction that imagines an alternative future based on an alternative understanding of history; where Walker imagines an alternative past in Temple of My Familiar, Starhawk imagines an alternative future.
The Temple of My Familiar — Frequently Asked Questions
What is The Temple of My Familiar about?
The Temple of My Familiar is an extraordinarily wide-ranging novel that follows six main characters across three continents and centuries: Suwelo, an American history professor grappling with his identity; Carlotta, his wife; Arveyda, a musician with a complicated history; Zede, a South American woman with her own ancient knowledge; Hal, an old man; and most importantly, Miss Lissie, an ancient woman who claims to remember all her previous lives — going back to the very beginning of human time, to a period before patriarchy and before the colonization of Africa. Miss Lissie's memories carry the novel's central argument: that the official history of human civilization has suppressed and ignored the history of women, of Africans, of the colonized, and that recovering those histories is necessary for human wholeness.
Who is Miss Lissie?
Miss Lissie is the novel's most distinctive and philosophically central character — an ancient woman who remembers all her previous lives, going back hundreds of thousands of years. Her memories include lives as a human woman before patriarchy, as a white lion, and as various people across different historical periods and cultures. Walker uses Miss Lissie's memories to tell an alternative history of humanity: a history in which the goddess-worshipping, matriarchal societies that preceded patriarchal conquest were the original condition of human civilization; in which Africa was the center of the human world; in which women's knowledge and women's spiritual traditions were suppressed by the violence of conquest and colonization. Miss Lissie is Walker's most ambitious character, and she is either the novel's greatest achievement or its greatest weakness depending on how the reader responds to the scope of Walker's spiritual argument.
How does The Temple of My Familiar relate to The Color Purple?
The Temple of My Familiar is a companion to The Color Purple — it continues the stories of Celie and Shug (though they appear only briefly), and it gives major roles to Adam and Tashi (Celie's stepson and his African wife) who were minor characters in The Color Purple. Walker is revisiting the world of The Color Purple and extending it in space and time: into Africa, into ancient history, into a spiritual dimension that the epistolary realism of The Color Purple could not accommodate. The novel also extends the themes of The Color Purple: the liberation of Black women, the spiritual dimensions of that liberation, and the connection between Black American and African women's experiences.
Why is The Temple of My Familiar so divisive?
The Temple of My Familiar is Walker's most controversial novel because its ambition is so vast and its claims are so sweeping — about human history, about the nature of memory, about the relationship between Africa and the Americas, about spiritual realities — that readers who accept Walker's premises find it exhilarating, while readers who do not find it overwrought or New Age. The novel's length and the number of its characters also make it demanding in ways that The Color Purple is not. Critics have noted that the novel's argument is carried more by assertion than by the kind of concrete, embodied storytelling that makes The Color Purple so powerful. For readers willing to accept Walker's terms, it is one of the most intellectually ambitious of her works.
What should I read after The Temple of My Familiar?
After The Temple of My Familiar, Possessing the Secret of Joy (1992) continues Tashi's story directly. The Color Purple (1982) is the essential predecessor. Meridian (1976) is Walker's companion civil rights novel. For fiction in the same tradition of wide-ranging spiritual and historical ambition, Toni Morrison's Beloved and Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude are important companions.
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