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

by Sarah Payne Stuart

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

Genres: Memoir

256 pages, Hardcover

First published September 23, 1998

Reviews

[Kevin A. · Rating 3 out of 5]

I picked this up at a library book sale because it seemed so impossibly WASPy. But what started out as a hate read turned into enjoyment despite the fact that being Robert Lowell’s cousin is a remarkably thin Reed to structures book around.

[Susan · Rating 2 out of 5]

I generally love a good memoir of a decaying WASP family beset by alcoholism, lost fortunes, mental illness, and snobbishness. This one was not as compelling as many.

[Randy Harris · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book started out okay, Sarah Payne Stuart can write. Several moments early on are quite funny with snappy clever prose with snarky lines. But eventually the book gets bogged down in the long story of several generations of her family, with (like the cover says) lots of money, disfunction and madness. Lots of madness. These people were such products of their godless pagan snooty world, they knew nothing else. One of the problems with the book was it desperately needed a map of the family tree in the front, something I’m sure I would have referenced dozens of times. Overall, interesting, if you like to read the lives of rich east coast blue bloods from generations ago and their petty eccentric old money old fashion ways.

[Rachel · Rating 5 out of 5]

For leisure reading, Stuart's family history/biography is one of the best--conversational, humorous, and casually smart. Stuart recounts the Lowell and Winslow WASP family histories all the way back to Puritan times, although she pays particular attention to the generations immediately preceding and following Robert Lowell, the confessional poet. Stuart's task is extremely daunting, since many of us continue to feel resentment toward aristocratic New England WASPs for their class and ethnic privilege as well as all of the wrongs they committed toward other groups. Stuart reviews her family history with wit, grace, good humor, and humility. At times, Stuart is angry at her family, while at other times she is proud of them or profoundly protective. Still, she shuns excessive emotion of any shade: guilt, shame, embarrassment, pride, defensiveness, resentment, romanticism, nostalgia. Any one of those registers can offend or annoy, so I'm very impressed that she managed to avoid them. Having grown up herself in a middle-class branch of the family that had declined in terms of wealth and social prestige (her father was a mattress salesman), Stuart brings a sense of detachment and irony that helps her writing. She pays particular attention to the prevalence of bipolar disorder in her family, most famously as seen in her cousin Robert Lowell but also affecting her immediate family--both her mother and brother suffered from the illness. She views the disease as genetic but is aware that environmental factors may trigger the illness, which is why she reviews her WASP family history with such wistful curiosity and compassion.

[Sandy · Rating 3 out of 5]

I find myself chuckling page after page in this entertaining book. Its funny and engaging portrayal of the high life and the low of a renown brahmin family in Boston and environs, (running concurrently to my own such family) is rich in New England Puritan history both period and personal. It is a no-holes-barred memoir of the down-and-out of the upper crust of Boston's pre-eminent social circles of the 1900's. Not only do I come across common ancestors but neighborhood addresses, distinctive traits and habits, attitudes and pretenses that are oh-so-familiar it invites many a laugh. It has taken me a long time to read this book, several false starts as it's at someone else's house, but it has been worth each pick-up-and-read a little more.
It is a book I will probably buy simply because it conveys and portrays so much of where I have come from and thus in many ways still am, complete with all its faults and foibles.
The general brahmin, 'Mayflower' decendents history of my family, just with the names changed!

[Jon]

To judge by this memoir Sarah Payne Stuart is--mercifully--less manic and destructive than her famous first cousin once removed, Robert Lowell. Unfortunately, she's also a considerably less talented writer than he was, more goofy than insightful. I found her treatment of the writer Jean Stafford, Lowell's first wife, particularly cruel. This MAY be worth reading for anyone who's read Ian Hamilton's Lowell biography and wants more information about Lowell and his family history from an insider's perspective. Fun fact: Payne Stuart's brother John Payne played on Van Morrison's classic album, ASTRAL WEEKS.

[Rose · Rating 4 out of 5]

For a book about Robert Lowell, it mostly concerns other members of the author's family. It does have some very interesting insights into an old New England family. Some illustrations. I would recommend reading this book before the author's "Perfectly Miserable," as some of that book is a bit mysterious without the information in "My First Cousin Once Removed."

[Laura Vona · Rating 5 out of 5]

I adored this book and could see so much of my own eccentric, yet well meaning Boston relatives in it. Well written, fast paced, interesting and tho bittersweet at times it was also an hysterically charming read.
I enjoyed it tremendously.

[B · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good example of the literature of WASP decline; cf. Tad Friend's Cheerful Money, George Howe Colt's The Big House, and the works of John P. Marquand.

[courtney · Rating 3 out of 5]

really pleasant and interesting. lots of references to kenyon college...

[Skye]

recommended by Victoria Capehart!