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Perfectly Miserable: Guilt, God and Real Estate in a Small Town
Author:
Stuart, Sarah Payne
Biographee:
Stuart, Sarah Payne
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Class:
Biography
Age: Adult
Language: English
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LC: PS3569.T
Print Run: 30000
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ISBN-13: 9781594631818
LCCN: 2013048095
Imprint: Riverhead Books
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Pub Date: 06/12/2014
Availability: Out of Print Confirmed
List: $27.95
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Hardcover
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Physical Description:
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307 pages : illustrations ; 22 cm
H 8.63",
W 5.88",
D 1",
0.95 lbs.
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LC Series:
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Brodart Sources:
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Bibliographies:
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Public Library Core Collection: Nonfiction, 16th ed.
Public Library Core Collection: Nonfiction, 17th ed.
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Awards:
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Kirkus Best Books
Kirkus Starred Reviews
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Starred Reviews:
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Kirkus Reviews
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TIPS Subjects:
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Literature, American
Biography, Individual
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BISAC Subjects: |
BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Memoirs
BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Literary Figures
BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Women
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LC Subjects:
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Authors, American, 20th century, Biography
Authors, American, 21st century, Biography
BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Literary
BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Personal Memoirs
BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Women
Stuart, Sarah Payne
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SEARS Subjects: |
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Reading Programs: |
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| Annotations |
| ONIX annotations | 01/18/2016 |
| A wryly comic memoir that examines the pillars of New England WASP cultureclass, history, family, money, envy, perfection, and, of course, real estatethrough the lens of mothers and daughters. At eighteen, Sarah Payne Stuart fled her mother and all the other disapproving mothers of her too perfect hometown of Concord, Massachusetts, only to return years later when she had children of her own. Whether to defy the previous generation or finally earn their approval and enter their ranks, she hurled herself into upper-crust domesticity full throttle. In the twenty years Stuart spent back in her hometownin a series of ever more magnificent houses in ever grander neighborhoodsshe wasforced to connect with the cultural tradition of guilt and flawed parenting of a long legacy of local, literary women from Emersons wife, to Hawthornes, to the most famous and imposing of them all, Louisa May Alcotts iconic, guilt-tripping Marmee.When Stuarts own mother dies, she realizes that there is no one left to approve or disapprove. And so, with her suddenly grown children fleeing as she herself once did, Stuart leaves her hometown for the final time, bidding good-bye to the cozy ideals invented for her by Louisa May Alcott so many years ago, which may or may not ever have been based in reality. |
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| Starred Reviews: |
| Kirkus Reviews | 05/15/2014 |
| 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. 320pg. KIRKUS MEDIA LLC, c2014. |
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| Journal Reviews |
| BookPage | 06/01/2014 |
| Ah, WASPs: Those guilt-ridden, uptight, real estate-obsessed traditionalists. In Perfectly Miserable: Guilt, God and Real Estate in a Small Town, Sarah Payne Stuart captures the essence of this distinctive culture, tracing both her own childhood in Concord, Massachusetts, and the lives of some of Concord's famous residents, including Ralph Waldo Emerson and Louisa May Alcott. Stuart shocks herself when, after years in "the Victorian house of my dreams, thirty minutes from Manhattan," she and her husband Charlie decide to move back to Concord in a fit of adult homesickness. "Suddenly my best friends living nearby in the city, my fledgling career, and Charlie's rise at ABC News meant nothing," she writes. "Suddenly being cool and wearing a leather jacket while nursing my baby in a Greenwich Village restaurant meant nothing--next to the thought of my children floating toy boats on the Concord River while my mother and I looked on." She and Charlie settle into one fixer-upper after another, sinking into debt while they raise their young family. Along the way, Stuart makes peace with her family's history of repression, hurt and mental illness, and realizes the obvious parallels between her own family and other Concordians who have tried to rewrite their histories. (To wit: Despite Alcott's cozy, seemingly autobiographical portrait of Marmee and her little women, Alcott's real mother was a shrill martyr and her father a delusional freeloader.) Stuart writes honestly and lovingly about her aging parents, her childhood, money, the trials of parenthood and keeping her marriage afloat. In other words, everything. Perfectly Miserable is a gorgeously rendered portrait of modern life--and a reminder that some things never change. 320p. BOOKPAGE, c2014. |
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| Booklist | 05/15/2014 |
| 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. Haggas, Carol. 320p. AMERICAN LIBRARY ASSOCIATION, c2014. |
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| Publishers Weekly | 12/01/2014 |
| 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.--where 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 settlers--her mother's old money clan-- 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 Hill--"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. (June). 320p. Web-Exclusive Review. PUBLISHERS WEEKLY, c2014. |
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9781594631818,dl.it[0].title
| Review Citations |
| New York Times Book Review | 06/15/2014 |
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