Perfectly Miserable: Guilt, God and Real Estate in a Small Town

Sarah Payne Stuart never thought she’d return to the old-money, WASP-y world she spent her young adulthood yearning to escape. Her flight from her childhood home in Concord, Massachusetts, was swift and sure, and she spent many happy years adventuring elsewhere. When she becomes pregnant with her third child, however, she decides that the right place–the only place–for her family is back in Concord, which, in hindsight, has taken on a rosy glow. And so, with her husband and children and an overwhelming love of moving houses, she returns to the land of Louisa May Alcott, Emerson, and Thoreau.

Nothing is as perfect as she’d expected it to be, however, and her clear-eyed criticisms and analysis are what give Perfectly Miserable its edges. Stuart doesn’t spare herself one bit, and she writes honestly about her unfailing inability to find happiness and her against-the-odds convictions that the next house, and the next one, is where she’s meant to be. As she burns through real estate and rankles her parents and their friends, readers will feel Stuart’s painful surprise that nothing, really, can ever be as good in reality as it is in memory.