Perfectly Miserable

December 1, 2014
A follow-up to Stuart's previous family memoir, My First Cousin Once Removed, this evenhanded work takes aim at her double-edged WASP childhood in Concord, Mass.âwhere she and her documentary-producer husband moved back to raise their three young children. Living again among the God-fearing, hard-working, parsimonious descendants of the early Puritan settlersâher mother's old money clanâ Stuart felt comfortingly part of the Elect, yet also deeply conflicted. Concord was the storied seat of the Transcendentalists, artists and deep thinkers like Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne and the Bronson Alcott family, especially daughter Louisa May Alcott whose novel Little Women deeply informed Stuart's childhood. Guilt hovers over much of Stuart's sense of her childhood, involving her mother's depressive episodes and early breakdown, and her own desire to win her mother's approval, which she finally did by buying a house (well beyond their means) on Nashawtuc Hillâ"I had known that I was too weak to resist the cozy beauty of the hill," she admits, "and the terrible lure of its desirability." Skillfully, Stuart buttresses her own family's neuroses with those of Thoreau or the Alcotts for a hilariously bracing and honest look at generational mayhem and triumph.

Starred review from May 15, 2014
A writer's wickedly droll account of how she came to terms with her WASP heritage and the impossible expectations of "mother" New England.With its "pristine town center, gleaming with historically correct colors," Stuart's (My First Cousin Once Removed: Money, Madness, and the Family of Robert Lowell, 1998, etc.) hometown of Concord, Massachusetts, seemed the embodiment of perfection. But as Stuart well knew, high-flying moral pretensions, hypocrisy, and an insatiable hunger for social prestige and high-priced real estate bubbled just beneath the deceptively charming surface. In this wry memoir, the author explores her relationship with her hometown and with a whole host of Concord notables, from Ralph Waldo Emerson and Nathanial Hawthorne to Louisa May Alcott, whose fictional mother Marmee-and the perpetually miserable Alcott matriarch on whom she was based-represents everything good and bad about New England culture. A rebel who defied the WASP values of thrift, practicality and quiet snobbery, Payne fled Concord for New York after an early marriage. Yet within 10 years of leaving, her longing to return home became "obsessive." Concord had "become a kind of utopia, where [she] would give her children the perfect childhood." It also became a personal testing ground where she fantasized she could engage in error-free parenting while earning the approval of her own mother and father. Instead, Stuart found herself moving into larger and larger homes she and her husband could not afford and joining exclusive social clubs, all in the name of maintaining the facade of WASP success. Seeking enlightenment about her dilemmas and compulsions, the author examines her family's personal history as well as Concord literary history. She learned that her pattern of feeling guilt and smugness on the one hand and seeing nonexistent coziness on the other were part of a heritage best survived through self-deprecating humor.Satire at its finest.

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May 15, 2014
When one grows up in a town haunted by the ghosts of Emerson, Alcott, and Thoreau, it's hard not to feel that one is always held to a slightly higher set of standards. And when one's mother is related to both the poet Robert Lowell and the novelist Cleveland Amory, it's nearly impossible to believe that one could ever achieve sufficient success. So when Stuart decides to uproot her family to return to her hometown of Concord, Massachusetts, to re-create for her children the idyllic childhood she only imagined she experienced, she finds that the town's legacy of mothers both real and fictional make the task harder than she bargained for. In a charming memoir that combines the disarming honesty of personal narrative with the scholarly acumen of a literary historian, Stuart delves into the story of Alcott's beloved Marmee as well as her own mother's tumultuous past in order to confront the ever-confounding relationship between mothers and daughters and the never-ending quest for family approval.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)