Sebastian Stuart

WELCOME

Hi there, thanks for stopping by. I was born and raised in New York City. I went to the Grace Church School, the United Nations School, Collegiate and Charles Evans Hughes. Today I live in Cambridge, Massachusetts with my partner of thirty years novelist Stephen McCauley. I have a memoir coming out in July, What Wasn’t I Thinking? – A Memoir of Rebellion, Madness, and My Mother.

My novel, The Hour Between, won the Ferro-Grumley Award for Fiction and was an NPR “Season’s Reading Selection.” My psychological thriller, The Mentor, was a Book of the Month Club Selection. I ghostwrote the New York Times bestselling novel Charm! by Kendall Hart, and a co-wrote a national bestseller, 24-Karat Kids, published in eight languages. I’ve had numerous plays produced at LaMama, Theater for the New City, The Kitchen, and other downtown venues. Michael Musto of the Village Voice dubbed me “the poet laureate of the East Village.” I’ve won grants from the Edward Albee Foundation, the Jerome Foundation, among others.

DESCRIPTION OF WHAT WASN’T I THINKING? FROM THE PUBLISHER

Sebastian Stuart had a heady childhood. His brilliant, acerbic mother was the Entertainment Editor of Life magazine and his father was an Oscar-nominated filmmaker. James Baldwin was a dinner guest and Bette Midler paid a courtesy call. Yet beneath the glittering parties, the family was haunted by unspoken tragedy. By age fifteen Sebastian was dropping acid and turning tricks for money. He found friendship and solace with his cousin Tina, as aspiring poet and striking beauty who was signed by the Ford modeling agency. When Tina began to exhibit symptoms of schizophrenia, Sebastian was torn between a desire to save her and the fear of losing himself in her madness. In the vibrant prose that made him a bestselling novelist and award-winning playwright, Sebastian takes readers on a wild journey of self-discovery from San Francisco in the 70’s to New York in the AIDS-ravaged 80’s. The quest leads Sebastian to a sad and shocking understanding of his family history and the price of grief denied. And, ultimately, it leads to redemption. By turns hilarious, irreverent and heartbreaking, What Wasn’t I Thinking? is a story no reader will forget.

ADVANCE PRAISE FOR WHAT WASN’T I THINKING?

“Sebastian Stuart's dazzling memoir held me in its thrall like the best kind of novel. His mastery of suspense and his inherent humanity make for one electrifying read. And, like all good memoirists, he made me reexamine my own life along the way.” – Armistead Maupin

“A gripping read – as sad and sweet as life itself.” – Edmund White

"What Wasn't I Thinking? focuses on the bond between two devoted, precocious cousins and their unfolding lives. With its shifting scenes of Bohemian Greenwich Village and European cruises and modeling agencies and sexual frankness and complicated mothers and ever-clinking glasses, it balances being both madcap and a captivating, deeply moving chronicle of madness - a combination of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Franny and Zooey, and The Bell Jar. Or, more precisely, imagine Scout and Dill running away from home down in Alabama and being rescued by John Cheever. And yet know this: Sebastian Stuart has being queer in his writer's quiver and a voice all his own - plaintive and funny with the cadence of kindness running through it." -- Kevin Sessums, author of Mississippi Sissy

“What Wasn’t I Thinking is a sexy joyride of a memoir that takes readers from a privileged upbringing in glamorous post-war New York to a wild San Francisco in the 1970s and then back again. You can’t help but cheer for Sebastian Stuart as he makes his way into the world, a young gay man in search of heady experience who can only watch helplessly as his best friend and soul-mate, an emotionally fragile cousin named Tina, starts to lose her grip on reality. And affecting and addictive read.” -- Alysia Abbott, author of Fairyland

“A very fine memoir about a brilliant, kind, scared, lonely gay boy becoming a man.” -- Meredith Hall, author of the New York Times bestselling memoir Without a Map.