My First Cousin Once Removed: Money, Madness, and the Family of Robert Lowell [Hardcover]

Sarah Payne Stuart (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 23, 1998

The art of being truly funny is an undervalued one in these angst-ridden times, but it is an ability that acclaimed novelist Sarah Payne Stuart has in abundance. Her talents have never been on more glorious display than in My First Cousin Once Removed, a memoir--at once hilarious, personal and sad--of her extraordinary Boston Brahmin family, whose most famous member is the legendary poet Robert Lowell, the author's first cousin (once removed).

Sarah Payne Stuart grew up in a family of aristocratic lineage whose fortune had long ago been lost. (Among the many family documents cited is a Boston Globe article in which Lowell's bankrupt grandfather is quoted in his will as having left his children their good breeding and Boston heritage.) Stuart's upbringing carried with it a heady sense of privilege and entitlement, but without the money to back it up. This dichotomy--of being both anointed and strapped, of needing to keep up a brave front at all costs, even when members of successive generations of the family (including the author's brother and famous cousin) find themselves locked up in mental wards--forms the heart of this story. An irreverent and clear-sighted mediation on the claustrophobic yet seductive bonds of family, as well as an intimate portrait of a famous man, My First Cousin Once Removed is a wry and haunting story of survival in the midst of instability and dynastic decline.

Praise for Sarah Payne Stuart and My First Cousin Once Removed

"From a sometimes painful family history, Sarah Payne Stuart has created a poignant, funny, and ultimately triumphant memoir filled with great warmth and wisdom. Written in a refreshing, unforgettable voice which never falters nor sentimentalizes, My First Cousin Once Removed is a thoroughly terrific book."
--Doris Kerns Goodwin

"Stuart is a deft writer who knows to snare her audience with brilliant, bitter-black humor while touching lightly but with sure, probing fingers of our darker fears, our least favorite wounds."
--Seattle Weekly

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

The "first cousin" of this compelling, disconcertingly funny memoir is Robert Lowell--scion of two old New England families (the Winslows, his mother's side, go back even further than the Lowells), widely considered America's greatest poet during the 1960s, anti-Vietnam war activist, and incurable manic depressive. Lowell has been biographied before, notably by Ian Hamilton and Paul Mariani, but no other "life study" contains a particle of the intimacy, fondness, dismay, and above all humor that Sarah Payne Stuart brings to the subject. Stuart places "Bobby" in a loose-knit Winslow family tapestry, and reveals the back of the tapestry: the droll stories about Lowell's icy, chic mother and eccentric, rich Aunt Sarah, who disinherited him when he fathered a child out of wedlock; the excruciating holidays and bizarre Brahmin rituals; the family's mix of provincial pride and bruising disdain for their famous relation, "the king of conflicts."

As fresh and smart as the Lowell material is, the book really catches fire when Stuart tells her own immediate family's story: the two-year breakdown her beautiful mother suffered after giving birth to a daughter; the manic depression that nearly destroyed her brilliant brother, Johnny; the bad luck, blindness, and sheer selfishness that kept her branch perpetually strapped. Stuart has a satirist's eye, a standup comic's sense of timing, and fabulous material. And in My First Cousin Once Removed she makes the most of all of them. --David Laskin

From Publishers Weekly

There is undeniable charm in a memoirist who is aware of his or her own failings and can render them plainly. This is the case with Stuart, who admittedly doesn't much "get" the poetry of her mother's famous first cousinAand doesn't much care to. That this anti-intellectualism is more the rule than the exception in her family becomes clear as Stuart details generations of Lowells, Paynes and WinslowsAmany of whom emerge much more clearly here than in Lowell's poems or in previous portraits of the artist. The moneyed Uncle Cot and matriarchal Aunt Sarah, Lowell's grandfather Arthur Winslow ("He was my father," Lowell wrote of him), Grandmother "Gaga" and Uncle Devereux are all clearly and dispassionately drawn, and add to the reading of poems in which they appear. Lowell himself moves through the story as one whose doings are much discussed by the family, and Stuart wryly analyzes what the family thought of, say, his Pulitzer Prize for his first book at age 30, or his front-page letter to the New York Times declining an invitation to the Johnson White House in protest of the Vietnam War. But the main protagonist hereAaside from the family obsession with money and standingAis the manic depression that seems to run through the family, claiming, among others, Lowell and Stuart's mother and brothers, whose trials dominate the last third of the book. Still, it is Stuart's own voice that makes this book so appealing. Whether sympathetically skewering her kin, dissecting her own inheritance or digressing within a beloved anecdote, she is unfailingly forthright and clear-eyed. (Oct.) second wife, Elizabeth Hardwick, whose Sight-Readings (Forecasts, May 25) appeared this July.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Harper; 1st edition (September 23, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 006017689X
• ISBN-13: 978-0060176891
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.1 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,900,436 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Made me chuckle and cry, November 17, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: My First Cousin Once Removed: Money, Madness, and the Family of Robert Lowell (Paperback)

Perhaps the most entertaining book that I have ever read. Sarah Payne Stuart makes me howl and a second later makes me thank God that I've got both oars in the water. God Bless You SPS.

5.0 out of 5 stars Witty, intelligent, sensitive and remarkably detached, November 1, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: My First Cousin Once Removed: Money, Madness, and the Family of Robert Lowell (Hardcover)

Sarah Stuart has done a remarkable job of limning the WASP world of Robert Lowell's family - and her own. She is cheerfully honest, perceptive and quite amazingly intelligent. The picture she draws lingers with the reader long after the book has been put down. Her portrait of Lowell is refreshingly free from the amateur Freudian analysis so tiresomely characteristic of many memoirs.

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Overindulgent look at New England WASPs, January 2, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: My First Cousin Once Removed: Money, Madness, and the Family of Robert Lowell (Hardcover)

Ms. Stuart writes engagingly and at first I thought this history might include some fresh insight into Boston Brahmin culture. Somewhere in the middle of the book I began skimming, avoiding timeworn descriptions of WASP snobbery and emotional coldness. The one area in which the story might have added some depth, generations of psychiatric hospitalizations, is treated as a tour guide of hospitals for the rich. This book will only interest those completely unfamiliar New England WASP culture.