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.

From Library Journal
Stemming from an essay in the New York Times Book Review in 1994, Stuart's work grew to encompass not only the poet Robert Lowell and his marriages, his career, and his bouts with manic-depressive illness but those same elements in her own extended family as well. The family saga ebbs and flows from the author's Pilgrim ancestors through 1985, revealing how "in my family you are either crazy or built to withstand those who are." A fine writer, novelist Stuart (The Year Roger Wasn't Well, HarperCollins, 1994) is able to put some of Lowell's work into perspective by referring to family records and recollections. However, perhaps because of the age difference (Lowell was born in 1917, the author in 1952), there are disappointingly few new insights on the poet. Stuart does successfully document the manners, attitudes, and expectations of her New England WASP relatives during her formative years. For public and academic libraries with a demand for memoirs.-ACathy Sabol, Northern Virginia Community Coll., HerndonCopyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The New York Times Book Review, Reeve Lindbergh
It is a survivor's story, with so much intelligence, humor and affection brought to bear that even the monsters it occasionally offers up are appealing.

From Booklist
Novelist Stuart (The Year Roger Wasn't Well, 1994) has contributed yet another memoir to her extended family's contribution to American letters. She can trace herself back to the first Pilgrim woman to alight on American soil. Her relatives included not only cousin Robert Lowell, but governors Edward and Josiah Winslow, respectively friend and foe to the Indians. Stuart's forebears each seem to have written their own history of the family; their Boston manners too good for a row, they chose to fight it out in small volumes of prose. Robert Lowell, despite taking poetry as his genre of choice and winning the Pulitzer Prize at age 30, was not so different. The verses about the family that Stuart reproduces are nothing short of catty and make the poet out to be a bit of a prig. (The poet, and many other family members, suffered from manic depression, which may have made them more than a little mean at times.) Stuart's own memoir is chatty and well composed, and is, as much in tone as in content, a perfect peephole into the world of the "well bred." Although Stuart inherited little more than her family name, the sense of entitlement that went with it has passed unaltered through the generations. Stuart knows that well and writes of it with insight and humor. David Cline

Celia McGee, Boston Magazine
"Fine, sad, funny...Like all good memoirs, Stuart's provides entree into an entire swath of history and the places where it unfolded, with the added bonus that her family's story is attached to 300 years of America's...She learned many lessons from her study of a distinguished, tragic past, and we can count ourselves lucky that she put them together in this outstanding book."

Chicago Tribune
"Vivid and compelling...What makes Stuart's volume impressive is her empathetic group portrait of the Lowell clan, her unflappable refusal to sensationalize or aggrandize them, and a dry wit that is her principal tool in making sense of a large extended family."


"Stuart [is] an exceedingly likable memoirist, showing rueful grace, a sharp sense of humor, and a charming directness."

Book Description
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).

About the Author
Sarah Payne Stuart is the author of the acclaimed novels Men in Trouble and The Year Roger Wasn't Well. She lives in Concord, Massachusetts, with her husband and three children.

Excerpted from My First Cousin Once Removed : Money, Madness, and the Family of Robert Lowell by Sarah Payne Stuart. Copyright © 1999. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved
My first cousin once removed was Robert Lowell, The Pulitzer Prize-winning poet--a fact I just happened to mention on my application to Harvard College. The worst part was that I had to work this genealogical information into the essay. The application had a section for listing family members who had gone to Harvard, but it was only supposed to include immediate family members. The essay wasn't a real essay, just two little white spaces under the questions: "How have your personal experiences contributed to your intellectual growth?" and "How have your academic experiences contributed to your personal growth?" It was three o'clock in the morning, and the application was due the next day. So I started writing something moronic about my intellectual development--or was it my personal growth?--all the while saying to myself, I can't, I can't, when suddenly out of the blue came, "As I was having dinner last night with my first cousin once removed, Robert Lowell, the poet, I turned to him and said. . . ."That was a long time ago, in 1969, and it is time to make a clean breast of it now. Also, I might just as well admit that I don't get poetry. In high school I was good at subjects like "the Negro" and the "Culture of Poverty," but when it came to analyzing poems, forget it. To this day, put a gun to my head and I still cannot tell you the difference between the mood of a poem and the tone of a poem. My parents were no help. When I went to them with my homework, my father would just shake his head and say he wondered how he ever got such smart kids. My father is a big bragger about us kids--a feat, considering all that has transpired. Not long ago we were at a wedding reception, and across the room I saw my father motioning to me wildly, with his fingers in his mouth, trying to get me to whistle through my teeth, a talent of mine he had obviously just bragged about. It is lucky for my father that he has four kids, because usually one of us is doing all right. One kid might be in a mental hospital, another with the Maharishi, and another with a marriage on the rocks, and my father can turn to someone and say, "My son Bill just got a raise at his job." Still, I did not lie on the application to Harvard, technically speaking. Bobby--"Bobby" is what we called him in the family--had been over for dinner the night before. Bobby came out to visit us in Concord whenever he was teaching at Harvard. Concord, Massachusetts, is where I grew up, under the influence of the writings of Louisa May Alcott. My mother said there was an excruciating period when I called her Marmee and helped with the dishes every two seconds. Eight years ago, as a grown-up, I moved my husband and children from New York to Concord, on a wave of nostalgia. "So the kids can have swimming lessons at Walden Pond!" I cried out, though it turned out they wanted to have them at a pool. My mother and Bobby were first cousins, which is how Bobby became "once removed" from me, meaning that he is the same relationship to me as he is to my mother, just one generation away. Understanding "once-removes" is kind of an off-putting characteristic, but it is something I grew up with. Some families discuss politics or the shortest route to I-95 or how to cook a roast chicken in a paper bag; my family has murderously hot discussions about whether Sally Pickering, a woman no more interesting dead than she was alive, is related to us by blood or marriage. (It turns out everyone is correct: She was a cousin who married a cousin.) In my family, genes are everything, so that even being a manic depressive is a kind of badge of honor, proving the family's tenacity in sticking close to Boston, where there was no one to marry but one another. Bobby was a manic depressive. Half of my family is manic depressive; the rest is screwed up about it. I should mention that whenever I talk about my family it is usually my mother's family to whom I am referring. My father has been known to mention at funerals and other occasions that he has a family too. "The name McGuire would open any door in the South," he says, but nobody is listening. On the maternal side of my mother's family are the Thorndikes--whose claim to fame is Israel Thorndike, the first millionaire in New England, who looted British ships during the Revolutionary War and later got his portrait hung at Harvard. On the paternal side are the Winslows, who came over on the Mayflower, befriended the Indians, slaughtered the Indians, governed a colony, fled to Canada during the Revolution, and sold matches on the streets. Bobby is related to my mother through the Winslows.Bobby was an only child. He and my mother were one year apart, and when they were growing up they'd spend weeks together at their grandparents', where their mothers dropped them whenever they had a chance. Neither Bobby's mother nor my mother's mother was what you call a "baby person," although what kind of a person was left for them to be is hard to grasp since neither of them ever cooked, cleaned, earned a dime, or went to college. My mother was very beautiful--her mother used to dress her in Alice-blue velvet and have her sit at the piano with her hair flowing down her back, but sadly her talents lay elsewhere. Nor was she an intellectual. This never seemed to bother Bobby.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

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 meditation 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.

SYNOPSIS

This sometimes funny, often sad, but completely true story examines the fortunes of the family of novelist Sarah Payne Stuart. Stuart recalls the struggles of an aristocratic family whose sense of privilege and entitlement belied the fact their wealth was no more. In addition to their financial struggles, several members of the family (including Stuart's brother and her famous first cousin, poet Robert Lowell) wound up in mental institutions.Their struggle to keep up a proper facade, even as their world crumbled around them, makes a bittersweet tale that will inspire laughter and tears.

FROM THE CRITICS

Seattle Weekly

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

Reeve Lindbergh - New York Times Book Review

[This] is a survivor's story, with so much intelligence, humor and affection brought to bear that even the monsters it occasionally offers up are appealing.

Library Journal

Stemming from an essay in the New York Times Book Review in 1994, Stuart's work grew to encompass not only the poet Robert Lowell and his marriages, his career, and his bouts with manic-depressive illness but those same elements in her own extended family as well. The family saga ebbs and flows from the author's Pilgrim ancestors through 1985, revealing how "in my family you are either crazy or built to withstand those who are." A fine writer, novelist Stuart (The Year Roger Wasn't Well, HarperCollins, 1994) is able to put some of Lowell's work into perspective by referring to family records and recollections. However, perhaps because of the age difference (Lowell was born in 1917, the author in 1952), there are disappointingly few new insights on the poet. Stuart does successfully document the manners, attitudes, and expectations of her New England WASP relatives during her formative years. For public and academic libraries with a demand for memoirs. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 6/15/98.]--Cathy Sabol, Northern Virginia Community Coll., Herndon

Reeve Lindbergh

[This] is a survivor's story, with so much intelligence, humor and affection brought to bear that even the monsters it occasionally offers up are appealing. -- The New York Times Book Review

Kirkus Reviews

No literary tell-all, this chatty yet reflective history instead charts the Lowell family's dissolution through money and mental illness. With considerable narrative deftness, novelist Stuart (Men in Trouble) motors through centuries of Lowells (James Russell was Robert Lowell's great-granduncle, Amy a distant cousin) and related families, concentrating on some of Bobby's (his family nickname) pivotal relations. There was his 'cold and proper' mother, Charlotte Lowell; grandfather Arthur Winslow, whose approval he craved; and stern, rich Aunt Sarah, who loved yet then spurned Bobby. Sarah, the 'sweet, silly' baby sister of Charlotte, centered the clan, revealing their occasional artistic blind spots ('Why doesn't Bobby write about the sea?' she once asked. '`It's so pretty') and holding the family together even when it didn't want that. Depression-era real-estate investments and disinheritance in the 1960s lost the family money, and Stuart offers enough equivocation about it for cynics to call this the 'I was related to Lowell and all I got was a lousy book contract' memoir. Not only did Great-uncle Cot (Sarah's husband) bequeath fortune and effects to museums, but Stuart was also denied the official family 'Sarah' painting by John Singleton Copley because she 'didn't have a proper wall to hang it on.' Stuart, who rebelled her way through the '70s, knows the score: 'we asked for such treatment, though we didn't like it when we got it.' The family also lost money when financing psychiatric treatment for Bobby, for Stuart's mother and brother, and others. Stuart describes the roller-coaster of manic-depression with precision and compassion; her quotations from Bobby's works areparticularly useful. Above all, she is matter-of-fact. Though her glib asides sometimes backfire and her analysis lacks distance, this is an idiosyncratic alternative view of a leading American literary family.

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