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    "parsed_content": "He Wrote the Book on the Sedgwick \u2018Family Disease,\u2019 and Succumbed to ItJohn Sedgwick was born into an illustrious family, but privilege was only part of the story.Credit...By Evan Richman For The New York TimesSkip to contentSkip to site indexSearch & Section NavigationSection NavigationAccountAccountGoHome U.S.SECTIONSU.S.PoliticsNew YorkCaliforniaEducationHealthObituariesScienceClimateWeatherSportsBusinessTechThe UpshotThe MagazineTOP STORIESDonald TrumpSupreme CourtCongressImmigrationAbortionLatest PollsNEWSLETTERSThe MorningMake sense of the day\u2019s news and ideas.The EveningCatch up on big news, and wind down to end your day.See all newslettersPODCASTSThe DailyThe biggest stories of our time, in 20 minutes a day.See all podcastsWorldSECTIONSWorldAfricaAmericasAsiaAustraliaCanadaEuropeMiddle EastScienceClimateWeatherHealthObituariesTOP STORIESMiddle East CrisisRussia-Ukraine WarChina International RelationsThe Global ProfileLeer en Espa\u00f1olNEWSLETTERSThe WorldA guide to understanding the news, made for readers around the globe.Your Places: Global UpdateThe latest news for any part of the world you select.Canada LetterBackstories and analysis from our Canadian correspondents.See all newslettersBusinessSECTIONSBusinessTechEconomyMediaFinance and MarketsDealBookPersonal TechEnergy TransitionYour MoneyTOP STORIESU.S. EconomyStock MarketArtificial IntelligenceNEWSLETTERSDealBookThe most crucial business and policy news you need to know.On TechOur best tech reporting from the week.See all newslettersPODCASTSHard ForkOur tech journalists help you make sense of the rapidly changing tech world.See all podcastsArtsSECTIONSToday's ArtsBook ReviewBest SellersDanceMoviesMusicTelevisionTheaterPop CultureT MagazineVisual ArtsRECOMMENDATIONS100 Best Movies of the 21st CenturyCritic\u2019s PicksWhat to ReadWhat to WatchWhat to Listen To5 Minutes to Make You Love MusicNEWSLETTERSBooksReviews, news and features to help you find your next read.WatchingStreaming TV and movie recommendations.See all newslettersPODCASTSBook ReviewThe podcast that takes you inside the literary world.PopcastPop music news, new songs and albums, and artists of note.See all podcastsLifestyleSECTIONSAll LifestyleWellTravelStyleReal EstateFoodLoveYour MoneyPersonal TechT MagazineCOLUMNS36 HoursAsk WellThe HuntModern LoveWhere to EatVowsSocial Q\u2019sThe EthicistAsk the TherapistNEWSLETTERSThe WeekenderUnwind with stories about culture and the way we live.WellEssential news and guidance to live your healthiest life.See all newslettersPODCASTSModern LoveThe complicated love lives of real people.See all podcastsOpinionSECTIONSOpinionGuest EssaysEditorialsOp-DocsVideosLettersTOPICSPoliticsWorldBusinessTechClimateHealthCultureCOLUMNISTSJamelle BouieMaureen DowdDavid FrenchThomas L. 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Win ProjectionsNEWSLETTERSThe PulseDelivering the top stories in sports, Sunday to Friday.See all newslettersPLAYConnections: Sports Edition Connections: Soccer Edition Connections Coach U.S.InternationalCanadaEspa\u00f1ol\u4e2d\u6587He Wrote the Book on the Sedgwick \u2018Family Disease,\u2019 and Succumbed to ItJohn Sedgwick was born into an illustrious family, but privilege was only part of the story.Credit...By Evan Richman For The New York TimesSupported bySKIP ADVERTISEMENTShare full articleBy Penelope GreenOct. 2, 2026Updated 1:05 p.m. ETJohn Sedgwick was 6 when he was introduced to the family plot in Stockbridge, Mass.He and his siblings and cousins had been playing hide-and-seek in the town cemetery and were shooed away by a groundskeeper, whereupon John\u2019s step-grandmother, who was leading the game, declared, \u201cAll right then, we\u2019ll go play in our graveyard.\u201dThat would be the Sedgwick Pie, so named for its unusual layout: graves planted in concentric circles around a central monument, a stately granite obelisk marking the plot of the family patriarch, Theodore Sedgwick. Otherwise known as the Judge, Theodore was a staunch federalist and ambitious politician who had fought in the Revolutionary War. His second wife, Pamela, was buried alongside him, under a modest urn. Nearby lay Elizabeth Freeman, also known as Mumbet, a formidable formerly enslaved woman whom the Judge had represented in a lawsuit against her enslaver; when she won her freedom, she asked to come work for his family, and she remained with them until her death.ImageTheodore Sedgwick, the family patriarch, painted around 1808 by Gilbert Stuart. Known as the Judge, he was a staunch federalist and ambitious politician who had fought in the Revolutionary War.Credit...Gilbert Stuart\/Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, via VTR -- AlamyRadiating out from that first circle were the weather-stained headstones of five more generations of illustrious, accomplished Sedgwicks \u2014 authors, editors, lawyers, politicians and eccentrics \u2014 \u201ca whole little city of Sedgwicks,\u201d as John told WGBH-FM years later, \u201ctaking their heavenly rest.\u201dAt first, he was entranced. His initial foray into the Pie, through a stand of Norwegian spruce trees, was like entering a magic kingdom. But by the time he was a teenager, he found himself irritated by what he felt it represented: unseemly ancestor worship.The plot\u2019s nickname, it turned out, was a joke, bestowed by a sneering neighbor in the late 19th century. So was the legend that accompanied it \u2014 that on Judgment Day, the denizens of the Pie would rise up to face not their maker, but their patriarch. Sedgwicks of yore had been irritated by the slur and the fiction, but the name stuck and later generations embraced it.Mr. Sedgwick wore his patrimony lightly and ironically, and often wrote about it, chronicling the curious family funeral tradition involving a horse-drawn cart holding a Pie-bound Sedgwick tucked into a simple wood coffin that was covered with a deep red pall. (His father, in what is perhaps an apocryphal tale, is said to have ordered such coffins by the brace so that future Sedgwicks wouldn\u2019t be caught short.)VideoTheodore Sedgwick\u2019s grave sits at the center of the Sedgwick Pie, the family cemetery in Stockbridge, Mass.CreditCredit...Video by Richard Beaven For The New York TimesFor an article in New England Monthly, Mr. Sedgwick described how early Pie inhabitants had been buried in their pajamas; his family, he noted, seemed to view death as a kind of slumber party. So he bought himself a silky, Hugh Hefner-style dressing gown to be photographed in for the accompanying images, lampooning his family\u2019s quaint customs and the WASPy proclivity for tattered, moth-eaten garments by sporting a luxurious robe that, as he later wrote, was \u201cto die for. And in.\u201dBut when he turned 46, that patrimony had become a darker, more pernicious burden. By then, Mr. Sedgwick was a well-respected journalist and a prolific author working on his second novel, about an older society woman who has suffered a breakdown and her relationship with the psychiatric nurse who treats her at an old-line mental hospital. He modeled the protagonist on his mother, Emily Ames (Lincoln) Sedgwick, who was then in the midst of her fourth hospitalization for depression at McLean, the leafy refuge in a Boston suburb that famously treated Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, James Taylor and others, including a clutch of Sedgwicks, for what Winston Churchill called the \u201cblack dog.\u201dIt was the turn of the millennium, and Mr. Sedgwick had begun to feel untethered himself. Plagued by racing thoughts and worn ragged from weeks without sleep, he was ineluctably drawn, as his mother had been, to the idea of his own demise as a cure for what was bedeviling him. Medication and therapy eventually brought him back from the brink.Then his half brother, Harry, called one day to reveal that he had been ensnared by the same malady, and offered some insights into the Sedgwick legacy: Woven through all that privilege, it seemed, was a parallel history of mood disorders and suicides \u2014 more than the usual family complement, according to his psychiatrist.ImageJohn Sedgwick in 2002 at Upham Memorial Hall on the McLean hospital grounds, where one family member was confined for decades after strangling the family maid.Credit...Evan Richman for The New York TimesThink of Edie, Harry said, the beautiful, doomed Warhol muse and Vogue model who overdosed at 28, the third tragic death in her immediate family. And her erratic father, Francis, who spent time at the Austen Riggs Center in Stockbridge, Western Massachusetts\u2019s answer to McLean; in 1921, a doctor had diagnosed him as suffering from \u201cmanic-depressive psychosis,\u201d a relatively new entry in the psychiatric lexicon, and urged him not to have children. (He went on to have eight.) And their paternal grandfather, Henry Dwight Sedgwick, who had nearly killed himself after a love affair gone awry. And cousin Louis Agassiz Shaw II, who strangled the family maid and spent decades in a book-lined suite at Upham Memorial Hall, a building on the McLean campus known as the Harvard Club because it housed so many of the school\u2019s alumni. And so many others.AdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENT\u201cI think we\u2019ve got the family disease,\u201d Harry Sedgwick told John, who realized then that he also had the subject for his next book.Sedgwick history was a rich topic \u2014 the first Sedgwick landed in Massachusetts in 1635 or 1636 \u2014 but it had already been amply documented. And John, unlike others in his family, was a bit embarrassed by it, until he thought about investigating that history through this dark lens.Was the secret to the Sedgwicks\u2019 notable successes and equally impressive downfalls more than just a natural tendency toward ambition and its perils? Could the waxing and waning of moods and fortunes be attributed to the peaks and valleys of manic depression?\u201cIn My Blood: Six Generations of Madness and Desire in an American Family,\u201d Mr. Sedgwick\u2019s critically acclaimed 2007 memoir \u2014 The Boston Globe likened its epic scope to that of a great novel \u2014 was the result of his investigation.ImageWhen Mr. Sedgwick\u2019s memoir was published in 2007, The Boston Globe likened its epic scope to that of a great novel.Credit... Harper Perennial\u201cI was a Sedgwick, guilty as charged,\u201d he concluded. \u201cI could never peer into my own soul and find nothing, for my soul is not entirely my own.\u201dMr. Sedgwick died on Aug. 30 at his home in Brooklyn. He was 72.\u201cHe succumbed to the illness that he had tried so hard to understand,\u201d his daughter Sara Sedgwick Brown said in an interview. \u201cLike many joyful, funny people \u2014 they are that way because they know the alternative very deeply.\u201dShe added, \u201cTo be a Sedgwick is an elusive thing. It can be a trap. All of us struggle with the idea of privilege: What does it afford us and what does it mean?\u201dAdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENTMr. Sedgwick liked to say that he had been raised by the \u201clast Victorian\u201d because his father, Robert Minturn Sedgwick, an investment adviser known as Duke, was born near the end of that era in 1899. John and his two siblings were his second family; by the time John came along, Duke was 55.Duke was a proud, lifelong tender of the Sedgwick flame. In the 1940s, he raised $4,000 from family members to buy the Old House, the family manse that the Judge had built in Stockbridge, from a relative, and he established a trust for its upkeep. Since then, one Sedgwick or another has been in residence, paying a modest rent and making the house available for family weddings, funerals and reunions.ImageIn the 1940s, Mr. Sedgwick\u2019s father, Duke, raised $4,000 to buy the family manse in Stockbridge from a relative, and he established a trust for its upkeep.Credit...Richard Beaven for The New York TimesDuke\u2019s favorite poem was \u201cIf\u2014,\u201d Rudyard Kipling\u2019s ode to manhood, which he framed and hung on his bedroom wall. Every morning, he played \u201cOld Man River\u201d while doing his exercises \u2014 calisthenics drawn from the Canadian Mounties handbook. He was as devoted to his schools as he was to his family history, wearing his Groton blazer until it was threadbare and recounting plays from his Harvard football career at cocktail parties.John, a child of the 1960s, was not exactly enchanted by these fusty behaviors. At Groton, it was hard to escape the names of relatives whose deeds were emblazoned on plaques everywhere. He rebelled with typical mischief. Instead of turning in the required essay for an assignment in a religious studies class, he submitted a single, angry sentence: \u201cI read the book, OK?\u201dAt Harvard, where he earned a degree in English in 1977, he boarded at Radcliffe \u2014 that\u2019s where the girls were \u2014 and ignored an invitation to join the Porcellian Club, the college\u2019s exclusive \u201cfinal\u201d club revered by his father, whose collection of tchotchkes featuring pigs, the club\u2019s emblem, threatened to overrun the family\u2019s home in Dedham, Mass.ImageMr. Sedgwick in the 1979. By the time he was a teenager, he found himself irritated by what he felt the Sedgwick Pie represented: unseemly ancestor worship.Credit...Megan MarshallFor one of his first national magazine assignments, an article in Esquire published the year he graduated, John and the author Anne Fadiman, a former housemate, mocked the institution by conducting a textual analysis of its bathroom graffiti. They sorted their material into nine genres, including the archly titled Arse Poetica, which included this doggerel:She offered her honor,He honored her offer,And all night long,It was honor and offer.Mr. Sedgwick went on to contribute to GQ, Vanity Fair and The Atlantic, among other publications. A series about a private investigator written for The Real Paper, an alternative weekly in Boston, became his first book, \u201cNight Vision,\u201d in 1982. \u201cRich Kids\u201d (1985) explored the lives of young heirs, a subject of interest, he said, because he saw himself as a \u201crich kid manqu\u00e9,\u201d as he put it, or someone on the margins of wealth. (During the course of his research, word got out that he was an actual rich kid, and he became the object of a few unwelcome solicitations, including one from a man who asked him to back a Broadway musical.)\u201cHe was witty and empathetic,\u201d Ms. Fadiman said. \u201cHe could charm anyone into talking to him. I think that\u2019s what made him such a good reporter: Everyone wanted to be with him.\u201dLike most family memoirs, his book was not universally beloved by his extended clan, though many Sedgwicks had helped with the research. One cousin recalled his mother angrily scribbling corrections in the book\u2019s margins.ImageMr. Sedgwick in 1977, the year he graduated from Harvard. For one of his first national magazine assignments, he and Anne Fadiman mocked their alma mater by doing a textual analysis of its bathroom graffiti.Credit...Isabel Swift,\u00a0via Sedgwick family\u201cI was very pleased that it was a success,\u201d Robert Sedgwick, John\u2019s older brother, said in an interview. \u201cOther people were less enthusiastic.\u201dMr. Sedgwick, who was born John Shaw Sedgwick on May 5, 1954, in Boston, wrote three books of history in addition to his memoir: \u201cWar of Two: Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr and the Duel That Stunned the Nation\u201d (2015); \u201cBlood Moon: An American Epic of War and Splendor in the Cherokee Nation\u201d (2018), a biography of two rival Native American chiefs; and \u201cFrom the River to the Sea: The Untold Story of the Railroad War That Made the West\u201d (2021).His marriage to Megan Marshall, the Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer of Margaret Fuller, ended in 2007. He married Rana Foroohar, a columnist for The Financial Times, in 2013.AdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENTIn addition to his daughter Sara and his brother Robert, Ms. Foroohar survives him, along with another daughter, Josephine Sedgwick; two stepchildren, Darya and Alex Foroohar; six grandchildren; and a sister, Emily.At his death, he was working on what he described as a Hitchcockian novel of psychological suspense. \u201cHe was very excited about it,\u201d Daniel Conaway, his literary agent, said.Editors were always pestering Mr. Sedgwick to write something called \u201cThe Last WASP,\u201d the author Pagan Kennedy said, but it wasn\u2019t clear who, exactly, that would be.\u201cWhen he died, I thought maybe he was the last WASP,\u201d she added. \u201cHe knew he had been documenting a culture in decline, which was what made his work so interesting. And he did it so well because he was deeply of it, but still outside of it.\u201dImageMr. Sedgwick in May. This month, he will be buried at the Pie in Stockbridge, with all the bells and whistles that accompany the family tradition.Credit...Robert McSweenThis month, Mr. Sedgwick will be buried at the Pie, with all the bells and whistles that accompany that particular Sedgwick tradition: the horse-drawn cart, the red pall and his daughters taking on the role that their grandfather once played, leading the procession from the church to the gravesite.\u201cI\u2019m puzzled by what he would make of it,\u201d his daughter Sara said. \u201cIt\u2019s the most extreme version of the tension he carried his whole life \u2014 the deep sadness and the joy that is living, the celebration. He\u2019d think, \u2018Let\u2019s have the best party ever,\u2019 and be so sad he wasn\u2019t there to say or do something irreverent.\u201dMr. Sedgwick had long ago made peace with his patrimony, which he came to see as a boon rather than a curse.\u201cI see the oscillation of mood, the up-down-up-down, of the family as its quavering vitality,\u201d he wrote in his memoir. \u201cNothing in life remains static, or it is not life at all. It is like music: The sound requires vibration; the music dies when the string is still.\u201dIf you are having thoughts of suicide, call or text 988 to reach the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline or go to SpeakingOfSuicide.com\/resources for a list of additional resources.AdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENTAdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENT",
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