Word: cousin
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...would shock gays here to know they had such power. Ken Miller left the state several times--"trying to get away from my own sexuality"--but eventually returned to his four siblings and 12 aunts and uncles. These extended families make coming out difficult: tell one person, and a cousin in the next town will find out. Many locals stay closeted. "And that's the way a lot of the society likes it," Miller says...
...story are amusing but nevertheless tender accounts of what it meant to grow up in a world built entirely on a pretense of keeping up appearances. But just like all those lost and mentally unstable Lowells and Winslows (the author's equally snobbish relatives on the paternal side), Cousin itself is never quite sure what it is. At times it is a barrage of various bildungsroman tales, the coming-of-age stories of various Lowell and Winslow family scions. At other times it is a relentless catalogue of family members moving in and out of prep schools, relationships, asylums...
What these not-so-subtle potshots at Harvardshow is that Cousin shines most and isultimately a completely satisfying read not as acoming-of-age story, a literary analysis or atravelogue, but as the hilarious personal memoirits madcap opening (in which Stuart races tofinish her application to Harvard the morning it'sdue) purports it to be. This opening also showshow her humor is mixed in with bittersweetrecollections of a life among unfounded arroganceand neurotic quirkiness: the problem Stuart facesin writing her essay--of defining herself based onher own merits and the merits of her first cousin(once removed) Robert Lowell-soon...
Indeed, Stuart's frank and biting insight andits manifestation in her writing is what savesMy First Cousin Once Removed from the fateof countless similar books before it--that ofeither just another whiny pseudo-Freudian accountof a life ruined by wealth or some tangentialbiography of a prominent man of letters. Stuarthas come to terms with a conflict that allfamilies face regardless of whether their addressis on Beacon Hill, Fifth Avenue or Skid Row: it'sfamily, after all. Both Robert Lowell and SarahPayne Stuart's stories of growing up run parallelin that both writers hold the vacuous andhypocritical snobbery of the family...
...comictiming, matched with a poet's (or at leastrelated-to-a-poet's) awareness and a mother'stenderness. She is quick to admit to the bigoted,petty and, yes, manic shortcomings of hermuch-institutionalized family, but just as quickto admit her own shortcomings and accept them all.As this first cousin knows, being neurotic isgood, but knowing you're neurotic is even better