In My Blood: Six Generations of Madness and Desire in an American Family

In My Blood: Six Generations of Madness and Desire in an American Family

by John Sedgwick
In My Blood: Six Generations of Madness and Desire in an American Family

In My Blood: Six Generations of Madness and Desire in an American Family

by John Sedgwick

Paperback(Reprint)

$16.99 
  • SHIP THIS ITEM
    Qualifies for Free Shipping
    Choose Expedited Shipping at checkout for delivery by Thursday, April 4
  • PICK UP IN STORE
    Check Availability at Nearby Stores

Related collections and offers


Overview

While working on his second novel, John Sedgwick spiraled into a depression so profound that it very nearly resulted in suicide. An author acclaimed for his intimate literary excursions into the rarified, moneyed enclave of Brahmin Boston, he decided to search for the roots of his malaise in the history of his own storied family—one of America's oldest and most notable. Following a bloodline that travels from Theodore Sedgwick, compatriot of George Washington and John Adams, to Edie Sedgwick, Andy Warhol's tragic muse, John Sedgwick's very personal journey of self-discovery became something far greater: a spellbinding study of the evolution of an extraordinary American family.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780060521677
Publisher: HarperCollins
Publication date: 01/29/2008
Edition description: Reprint
Pages: 448
Product dimensions: 5.31(w) x 8.00(h) x 1.01(d)

About the Author

John Sedgwick is the author of the novels The Dark House and The Education of Mrs. Bemis, and contributes regularly to Newsweek, GQ, and The Atlantic, among other publications. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Read an Excerpt

In My Blood

Six Generations of Madness and Desire in an American Family
By John Sedgwick

HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.

Copyright © 2007 John Sedgwick
All right reserved.



Chapter One

My Fall

In the fall of the millennial year of 2000, my fall, I was up on the third floor of my house, and I was pacing like a wild man, each step a drumbeat that pounded inside my skull. "I can't do this, I can't do this, I can't do this, I can't do this," I chanted over and over. Each time I'd stress a different word, as if these were lines from some demonic Dr. Seuss poem, but the meaning was the same: I can't go on like this. Not the way I'm feeling. I was pouring sweat; my pulse thudded in my ears. My eyes jumped from the pine floor to the white wall to the open door to the window. Seeing, but not taking in. The room, the world, was senseless to me; it had no form, no order, certainly no purpose. It seemed alien, frightening, just as I did. I was a stranger to myself, a crazed weirdo who'd leapt into my clothes, taken over my body, seized my brain.

At that point, I'd gone three weeks without a solid night's sleep, but I was more wired than exhausted. I might have been a jungle warrior, ready to jump at the sound of a twig snapping. I'd stopped eating, pretty much, since I'd decided I wasn't worth food. In the mirror I could almost see my eye sockets hollowing, as if, any minute, my bones might burst through the skin. Thoughts hurtled through my head like meteors, burningout before I could quite track them.

"I can't do this. I can't . . ."

I'd been toying with death for a while by then, almost daring myself to take a suicidal plunge. To feel nothing--feel nothing forever. I craved that. In my scarce moments of calm contemplation, I pondered various ways of bringing about my own demise. It was a comfort, like the prospect of a cool drink on a broiling hot day. Hanging myself, blowing my brains out--such acts seemed not at all ghoulish.

Most of all I wanted to take a long fall from a high place. I'd always had a fear of heights, but I started to think that was actually an attraction. A few days before, I'd stood by the bannister on the second floor, lifted a foot onto the railing, and hopped up a little, to see what it might be like to hurtle downward to the first floor like Primo Levi. It wasn't much of a drop from there, barely a dozen feet, and I'd probably have crashed down onto the front hall table without much harm. But now, on the third floor, as I paced about the room, I kept returning to the window. From there, it was a long way down, a good forty feet to a concrete walkway. Such a plunge seemed so right. I was falling, so I should fall.

I reached for the window, flipped the latch.

The proximate cause, as the lawyers say, was the two Ambien sleeping pills I'd taken the night before. I was desperate for sleep, but the bed was hell for me. As I lay there, I felt a prickling heat all over me, as if my body were being licked all over by infernal flames. Breathe deep, just breathe deep, my wife, Megan, sleepily counseled, having conquered insomnia this way during her two pregnancies. But I spent most nights twisting about in agony, trying to find a spot of coolness on the rumpled, sweat-soaked sheets on my side of the bed. I got good at judging the time by the shade of gray on the ceiling, the rate of the cars passing by the street out front.

My brother, Rob, no stranger to sleep troubles as a harried New York lawyer, recommended the Ambien to me as if it were a hot stock. "No side effects," he assured me. "Every lawyer I know is on it."

"Including you?" I asked.

"Of course!" He gave a throaty chuckle.

He's my older brother. Tall and energetic, he's almost invariably cheerful, and he made the pills seem cheerful, too.

I scored an Ambien prescription through a doctor friend. In retrospect, she should probably have asked me a few more questions, but at the time I was really glad she didn't, since I didn't have many good answers. I hurried off to the pharmacy like a junkie, sure that happy, sleep-filled nights were soon to be mine. That night, I moved upstairs to the guest bedroom on the third floor, since I didn't want to disturb Megan any more with my writhing.

I took the pill, then lay back on the bed, eager for the letting-go. But the pill didn't give me the milky calm I'd expected; if anything it made me feel alert, as if I should be doing quadratic equations, composing Elizabethan sonnets, inventorying my sins. So I took another, which set my thoughts racing even faster; I felt my heart rate rise. I didn't take another. Sleep, even the notion of it, fled. I didn't close my eyes the whole night, just lay there staring in terror at the ceiling until morning. Then I got up and went nuts.

As I say, the Ambien was the proximate cause. But there were others. I'd recently placed my mother in a locked ward at McLean Hospital for her fourth hospitalization for major depression, a disease that she'd been fighting since college. Always a tender person, she'd become increasingly frail with age, both emotionally and physically. After my father's death in 1976, she'd had trouble adjusting to the solitude, the exposure, that had come once her big bear of a husband was no longer around to protect her.

It was during hospitalization number three that I'd had the bright idea of writing a novel about her. Not her exactly, but someone like her, an elderly Bostonian patient, proud but broken, at an old-line mental hospital that, like McLean, had . . .



Continues...

Excerpted from In My Blood by John Sedgwick Copyright © 2007 by John Sedgwick. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Table of Contents

The Genealogy of the Sedgwick Family     xiv
Preliminaries
My Fall     3
Our Graveyard     13
The Legacy
A Man of Property     23
Mr. Sedgwick Builds His Dream House     31
A Friend of Order     35
Among the River Gods     43
The War Within the War     49
Williams Family Secrets     57
The Household Did Not Run of Itself     61
All Men Are Born Free and Equal     69
The Proper Object of Gibbets & Racks     79
Bottled Lightning     93
The State of Widowhood     99
A Disorder of the Blood     107
Among the Maniacs     113
The Reign of Terror     117
Colonel Lovejoy's Methods     121
It Can Not Be Told     133
In Mamma's Room     141
The Legacy Defined
The Third Mrs. Sedgwick     147
The Will     153
To Worship the Dead     157
Catharine in Silhouette     161
I Have Located My Heaven     175
The Great Central Fire     181
In the Country Burial Place, Would I Lie     199
The Price of Legacy
The Great Wheel Turns     207
Babbo & Ellery     227
Marrying Up     237
Good Night, Sweet Prince     243
The Family Patriarch     251
Evasion and Escape     263
Sally & Shan     275
The Anti-Helen     279
My Mother's Diary     283
A Little Scratch on the Chromosomes     291
Little Duke     303
Edie, Superstar     315
"One Loves to Remember Beauty"     327
In Loco Parentis     331
"We're Ruined"     343
"Wssht"     355
What Remains
Our Interior Weather     363
A Guide to Life     379
Acknowledgments     383
A Note on Sources     387
Index     401

What People are Saying About This

Linda Wertheimer

“Compelling family biography…These people are...like characters in a very good novel...[Sedgwick] writes with great confidence.”

Donna Seaman

“Engrossing, affecting, and enlightening...A grand, candid, and sensitive family memoir...unique in its perspective on American history.”

From the B&N Reads Blog

Customer Reviews