My First Cousin Once Removed: Money, Madness, and the Family of Robert Lowell

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