Word: stuarts
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...Sarah Payne Stuart...
...neurotic, but neurotic's good!" quips Sarah Payne Stuart's family psychiatrist in Stuart's My First Cousin Once Removed, a painfully funny and poignant memoir about life in the Boston Brahmin Lowell clan (known best as a family running short on both money and sanity). The book centers specifically on the neurotic and manic depressive genius of Robert Lowell, the Pulitzer Prize-winning confessional poet-cum-activist and titular "first cousin" of the author's mother (hence the author is "removed" from him by one generation). Sarah Payne Stuart '73 treats "Bobby" (as the family called Robert Lowell...
...these catalogues that the book isweakest; the chapters recounting the nomadicwanderings of Stuart's aunts and uncles--up anddown the East Coast, back and forth across theAtlantic--are entirely forgettable. Of marginalinterest in these lengthy dives into the past arethe glimpses of recent and not-so recentHarvardiana: contempt for the ghettos of NewHaven; romantic entanglements shot to hell over asquash game in Adams House; a complete mentalbreakdown in Lamont Library; a tour of a chintzyQuincy House bachelor pad belonging to her famedcousin; and of course standard turn-of-the-centuryRadcliffe gripes about having to settle forhusbands from the A.D. rather...
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...
...already know I want to go into the military, so that's one," said Stuart A.M. Szabo '02, who anticipates at least four careers. "I'm also one of those rare Harvard students considering investment banking, and that's two careers right there...