“Songs of Three Islands, a Story of Mental Illness in an Iconic American Family”

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THE paved road has given way to dirt. At its narrowest stretches, with trees all around and hints of the craggy Maine shoreline ahead, it most likely looks the way it did when Millicent Monks’s great-grandfather first bought the entire island, in the 1890s.

Branches brush against the Lexus SUV, and its driver, Ms. Monks’s husband, Bobby, slows to make way for a woman, dressed for the summer rain, who appears on the path.

“That’s my ex-stepbrother’s ex-wife,” Ms. Monks, 75, says as she and the woman exchange waves. “That’s what it’s like around here.”

Indeed. There are 42 families, all loosely related, on this private island in southern Maine, one of the trio Ms. Monks refers to in her memoir, “Songs of Three Islands, a Story of Mental Illness in an Iconic American Family,” recently published by Atlas & Company.

The family of the subtitle is the Carnegies; Millicent’s great-grandfather on her mother’s side was Thomas, brother to Andrew. The first of the islands, Cumberland, off the coast of Georgia, is where generations of Carnegies (and a few of the Rockefellers they married) enjoyed the luxuries of the Gilded Age. It has since become a national park, and was where John F. Kennedy Jr. married Carolyn Bessette.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/12/fashion/12Monks.html?th&emc=th