The Temple of My Familiar

The Temple of My Familiar (1989) is a novel by Alice Walker. It follows the intersecting lives of multiple characters across countries and lifetimes, exploring the themes of The Feminine Experience, The Historical Trauma of Colonization, and Spirituality in the Diaspora.

Alice Walker is an internationally acclaimed and celebrated writer, poet, and activist. Her novel The Color Purple won a National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1983. Characters from this classic feature in The Temple of My Familiar, with the latter often viewed as a sequel.

This guide is based on the 2011 Orion Kindle Edition.

Note: This novel is nonlinear and interweaves various narratives with little delineation between story threads. For the sake of clarity, this guide summarizes each Part in a linear manner, with characters’ names as subheadings to denote which narrative is being summarized.

Content Warning: This book contains descriptions of racial and gender oppression, and the attendant isms and discriminatory language; rape and sexual violence; and substance addiction.

Plot Summary

Carlotta is a Latin American woman. Her mother, Zedé, escaped to the United States with her when she was a young child, and Carlotta grew up in San Francisco. Zedé makes and sells feathered capes, and Carlotta meets Arveyda, a rockstar, when delivering one of Zedé’s capes to him. The two fall in love, get married, and have two children. A few years into their marriage, however, Arveyda and Zedé have an affair. Heartbroken and betrayed by her mother and husband, Carlotta moves out with the children, while Arveyda and Zedé travel through South America and visit Zedé’s home country. Carlotta has an affair with Suwelo, a history professor and colleague at the university where she teaches literature. He is married to Fanny. Fanny used to teach women’s studies at the same university but now runs a massage parlor that Carlotta frequents. Suwelo abruptly dumps Carlotta and returns to Fanny, leaving Carlotta angry for a long time.

Arveyda returns without Zedé, who has stayed back to search for her own mother, and tells Carlotta Zedé’s story. While working as a teacher after university, she was arrested for being a Communist, and then she fell in love with a fellow prisoner, “Jesús”—Carlotta’s father. Jesús was brutally murdered when the guards discovered him with Zedé, and she was beaten and raped in turn. Jesús’s tribespeople saved Zedé, and after Carlotta’s birth, she moved away to work as a maid in a “school.” The “school” is a residential institution housing those with physical and mental illnesses and disabilities, but unbeknownst to the families of the inmates, the latter are kept drugged and locked up. One of the inmates, Mary Ann Haverstock, was sent there by her wealthy parents because of her extremist political associations and drug addiction. Zedé wrote to them about Mary Ann’s condition, and they came and took their daughter away. Mary Ann returned and helped Zedé and Carlotta escape. She put them on a boat headed for the American border; Zedé and Carlotta made it successfully across, but Mary Ann’s yacht sunk in a storm, and she is presumed dead.

Suwelo arrives at his late great-uncle Rafe’s house, which he has recently inherited. He meets and spends time with Rafe’s friends, Hal and Lissie. Hal tells Suwelo about his and Lissie’s love story: They grew up together, got married as young adults, and then had a daughter. However, having to assist with the childbirth deeply affected Hal. He lost all sexual desire for Lissie and became unwilling to put her through that kind of pain again. Hal and Lissie have lived together platonically ever since. Lissie goes on to take many other lovers, including Rafe, when the three of them live together.

Lissie remembers many of her past lives and recounts them to Suwelo. Suwelo, in turn, opens up to Hal and Lissie about his relationship with Fanny, his ex-wife. They were married and in love, but Fanny began to feel suffocated by the institution of marriage and asked Suwelo for a divorce. Despite her assurances that she still loved him, Suwelo still felt abandoned and rejected. He turned to pornography, had an affair with Carlotta, and eventually returned to Fanny. Fanny felt betrayed by his actions and became cold and distant with him. Suwelo’s conversations with Hal and Lissie about his relationship with Fanny lead him to see how he often behaved in sexist and insensitive ways.

Fanny’s mother, Olivia, was conceived through rape—her biological mother, Celie, was raped by her stepfather. Olivia and her brother, Adam, were given away by Celie’s stepfather, and they grew up in Africa. They were raised by their aunt Nettie and adoptive parents, Samuel and Corrine, who were missionaries. Olivia met Celie for the first time when she was in her thirties upon returning to America; she was already pregnant with Fanny, the result of an affair with an African man, Dahvid. Celie lived with her lover and partner, Shug, and Fanny was mostly raised by the two women, as Olivia pursued her studies at nursing school. Here, Olivia met and married Fanny’s stepfather, Lance, who was a loving and trustworthy partner until his death.

When Fanny was an adult, Olivia took her to Africa to meet her biological father, a famous writer and playwright whom everyone called Ola. Fanny met and spent time with Ola and her half-sister, Nzingha, whose mother was a guerrilla warrior and Ola’s first wife. Fanny returned to Africa upon Ola’s death and met Ola’s second wife: Mary Ann, who now goes by the name Mary Jane Briden.

After rescuing Zedé and Carlotta, Mary Ann faked her death and fled to London, where she started over under her new name. She met her great-aunt, Eleanora Burnham, through whom Mary Jane discovered another ancestor: Eleandra Peacock, Eleanora’s great-aunt, who traveled the world and loved and lived in Africa for years. Inspired by Eleandra’s journals, Mary Jane moved to Africa where she started an art school for students with physical and mental illness and disabilities. When the country she was in began to deport white people after gaining independence, Mary Jane went to Ola for help. They decided to marry so she could gain citizenship and continue doing her good work. Their relationship remained entirely platonic, and they became close friends and allies over the years.

After spending time with Hal and Lissie, a changed Suwelo returns home and reconnects with Fanny; they begin working on their relationship again. When Fanny begins therapy for the compulsive fantasies she has of harming white people, she unearths a memory of being mistreated by a white friend’s grandmother in childhood. Following this, she begins to grieve and heal.

Lissie passes away, and Hal sends Suwelo tapes that she recorded for him. In them, she details more past lives she never told Hal about, including one in which she was a white man and one in which she was a lion. She encourages Suwelo to work through the pain of his parents’ deaths, as well as make amends with Carlotta.

When Suwelo goes to meet Carlotta, he finds her living with Arveyda again, whom she has moved back in with for the children’s sake. They now work together as musicians. Suwelo is amazed and astonished, as he never knew who Carlotta’s husband was: Arveyda, who is also Fanny’s favorite musician. Suwelo and Carlotta catch up, and over time, the two couples become good friends. Carlotta tells Suwelo about Arveyda and Zedé, and how Zedé managed to find her own mother and move to Mexico (both of them live there, now). Suwelo tells Carlotta about his own parents, including their abusive marriage and their death in a car crash because of his father’s drunk driving. Simultaneously, Fanny and Arveyda feel a kindred connection to each other and make love together. The book ends years after Lissie’s death, as Suwelo visits Hal in the nursing home he now resides in to show him Lissie’s tapes and tell him about the rest of her lives.