The Temple of My Familiar was published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich in 1989. Walker described it as “a romance of the last 500,000 years,” and the description is not hyperbolic. The novel follows several characters — some connected to Celie’s world from The Color Purple, others new — across multiple lifetimes. Lissie, the novel’s central figure, has lived hundreds of lives: as an African woman, a white man, a lion, a being in pre-human consciousness. Through Lissie’s accumulated memories, Walker constructs an alternative history of humanity in which patriarchy, slavery, and ecological destruction are deviations from an original state of goddess-centered harmony.
The novel interweaves these deep-time narratives with contemporary stories: Suwelo, a history professor, learns from Lissie’s memories to reimagine his understanding of the past; Fanny, Celie’s granddaughter, seeks spiritual wholeness through travel to Africa and connection to ancestral knowledge; Arveyda, a musician, explores the relationship between art and healing. The structure is deliberately non-linear — Walker moves between centuries, continents, and states of being with a freedom that owes more to mythology than to realist fiction.
Critics were deeply divided. Those sympathetic to Walker’s project praised the novel’s ambition and its attempt to create a feminist mythology adequate to the scale of human history. Detractors found it diffuse, didactic, and insufficiently grounded in the specific social realism that made The Color Purple powerful. The novel’s spiritual framework — reincarnation, goddess worship, a pre-patriarchal golden age — was dismissed by some as New Age sentimentality.
Collecting The Temple of My Familiar
First edition (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, New York, 1989): Hardcover with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $25–$60
- Very good: $10–$25