Perfectly Miserable: Guilt, God and Real Estate in a Small Town
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. --Carol Haggas