Product Description

John Sedgwick's widely praised novels introduced readers to the rarified enclave of Brahmin Boston, in which privilege and elitism, handed down from one generation to the next, come at a price. He discovered for himself just how great that price can be when, while writing his second novel, he spiraled into a profound depression that threatened his life.

This crisis provoked him to search for the source of his malaise. Did it begin with him, or did it begin before, possibly even long before, with previous generations whose genes he bore? If so, how had the "family illness," as he came to think of it, shaped their lives, and come to define his? To find the answers, he launched into a full-scale investigation of his family's history—one of the oldest, and fully documented in America. It was, at once, a very personal journey of self-discovery, and a broader retracing of his family's evolution, as he pored over the many extraordinary Sedgwicks who had gone before—from the protean early Speaker of the House Theodore Sedgwick through to Edie Sedgwick, Andy Warhol's muse and the 1960s "It Girl." Both a brimming family saga and a courageous narrative, the book paints a startlingly candid portrait of a man and an eminent American family.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #331518 in Books
• Published on: 2007-01-01
• Released on: 2007-01-09
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 432 pages

From Publishers Weekly
In this overwritten family biography–cum–memoir, novelist Sedgwick (The Education of Mrs. Bemis) traces in great detail multiples generations of his wealthy yet ill-starred family. Beginning with his own near suicide, Sedgwick takes the unrelenting trials and tribulations of his family and tries to tie them to some parallel history of the U.S. It doesn't work. Reaching back to the late 18th century, the family Sedgwick was in the upper tier of New England society. In Sedgwick's telling, Theodore Sedgwick, a prosperous attorney, set the family off to its posh but difficult history by swindling an old Native American woman out of her property in western Massachusetts. Building a grand country home—a home that would become both family redoubt and scene of some intergenerational depravities—Theodore suffered from what would now be diagnosed as depression. In fact, depression and madness dog the coming generations most famously in the incarnation of Edie Sedgwick, Warhol superstar, world-class drug addict and celebrity suicide. This memoir is not without its pleasures. Sedgwick has a keen eye for detail and a voracious appetite for family lore and history (Catherine Maria Sedgwick was a popular mid-18th-century author; Kyra Sedgwick is an actress). The finely honed prose glides along effortlessly; it just doesn't add up to much. (Jan.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
The acclaimed novelist of The Dark House (2001) and The Education of Mrs. Bennis (2002) turns his attention inward and back through time as he attempts to unravel the mystery of his own psychologically and spiritually devastating bouts of depression. Alarmed by the depths of his despair and his inability to cope despite a successful career and a loving nuclear family, Sedgwick began to research the decidedly dark history of his distinguished New England family. In addition to an intensive course of psychotherapy, his investigations enabled him to comprehend the roots of his own melancholy. Reaching back through three centuries of seemingly stalwart Sedgwick citizens, he uncovered a pattern of mental illness handed down from one generation to the next. The individual stories are fascinating, and together they provide the context for Sedgwick to deconstruct his own demons. With a writer's eye for detail, Sedgwick provides an unflinchingly honest chronicle of an agonizing personal and familial odyssey. Margaret Flanagan
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

USA Today
"Gorgeous...fascinating...it's John Sedgwick's struggles with his own health and identity that give this book its literary power."

Customer Reviews

Multi-Generational Saga
John Sedgwick is a scion of one of those old, distinguished New England families whose name reverberates through the centuries. The Sedgwicks rose to prominence in colonial days and helped establish the infant Republic. They are quintessential WASPS, with a long lineage, proud traditions, and an ancestral home in the Berkshires. Unfortunately for them, the Sedgwicks also carry DNA which inclines some members of each generation to manic-depression and other mental/emotional problems.

I was engrossed in this book from page one. As a genealogist who hails from a WASP family even older than the Sedgwicks (though Southern and far less prosperous), I enjoyed reading about the successive generations of the family and their dramas and scandals. I was also interested in the descriptions of the Sedgwicks' struggles with depression, which has darkened the lives of some members of my own family. I appreciated the cost to John Sedgwick himself of telling this story, as he had to work through a depression of his own while dealing with issues which must have been very painful for him and for his siblings and other family members. I finished the book hoping and believing that John and his family have at last achieved some sense of peace and accomodation with their pasts.

Exercise in Self-Absorption
This book began with an interesting premise- the incidence of depression and other mental illness over six generations of a family. Because the family had a somewhat famous ancestor, it was possible to assemble information going back that far. Unfortunately, the author seemed to finish by writing a different book, basically an autobiography that, while filled with much detail, wasn't very interesting. The early parts were well-written, the later ones less so.

May you live in an interesting family
I once asked E. Digby Baltzell, who popularised the term WASP, why he wrote so little of the poor, and he said, "Because they are only statistics". The same frustration went with his native Philadelphia; the
Episcopalian-cum-Quaker gentry left behind few words about themselves. We
have the opposite ethos here.

As an exact contemporary of John Segwick, I have been reading him since
the Gil Lewis book, even saving articles from the late NEW ENGLAND magazine. Because of Baltzell and Sedgwick, I also visited Groton School
a few times (and wrote a precipitous and disastrous letter to a
distinguished alum, a total stranger, which I bitterly regret to this
day - oh, well). The last section of IN MY BLOOD hurt to read.

This is a superior book, which I believe took no little guts to write.
And writing is what the Sedgwicks have done for centuries now. But
we see the truth that behind the ornate doors of those estates in Social
Register country, human frailty lives as it does in the trailer park,
only magnified cruelly sometimes by the glass of great expectations.

I could not put it down.