Cousin Stories by Jessica Levine

Cousin Stories

My female cousins were sister substitutes and best friends for me growing up as an only child, and I’ve always been fascinated by cousin relationships both in reality and the arts. There are probably tragic novels about cousins and even more tragic Ph.D. dissertations about them, but the tales that come to my mind are intrinsically humorous, though they may flirt with danger. Take one of the more famous cousins in literature, Mr. Collins in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, the clergyman who appears as a possible suitor for Elizabeth Bennet. Because he could rescue the family from possible impoverishment, he is most eligible. Obsequious and ingratiating, he is also a ridiculous, unthinkable choice for Elizabeth. But he gives her the opportunity to assert her independence and intelligence, and he moves the story forward. 

What is it about cousins? In the Whit Stillman movie Barcelona, Fred (played by Chris Eigeman), a manipulative yet charming Navy officer, visits his conventional, idealistic cousin, Ted (played by Taylor Nichols), a businessman posted in Spain. Their love/hate relationship goes back to an episode at a family cabin on “the Lake” when they were ten. What happened exactly we never know, except that it involved the borrowing of a kayak that subsequently disappeared; like many family stories, this one remains shrouded in mystery. By the end of the movie, the two cousins have argued, fought, and shelved the kayak episode. They’ve also flirted with each other’s Spanish girlfriends and married each other off. In the cousinly mathematics of this crazy story, one plus one equals four. 

Cousins are provocative in a way that siblings aren’t. You owe more to a sister or brother than to a cousin, but cousins will test your boundaries until you give in or cut them off. They’re not around all the time the way siblings are, so when they show up, announced or unannounced as in Barcelona, a match is lit, the curtain goes up, there may even be fireworks. I had epic fun times between the ages of nine and twelve with a New York cousin of mine who was my companion when our parents went out for parties and left us to baby-sit each other. One New Year’s Eve we made fantastical ice cream sodas. Another time, we watched Hitchcock’s The Birds and got so scared we ran around my apartment screaming our heads off. But there was drama too, epic fights in which we disagreed about things, called each other liars and fought, grabbing each other’s hair and pulling it violently. 

I had in California a girl cousin who showed me a different world when I spent August of 1971 with that branch of my family. Whereas my New York parents fiercely resisted the times—I wasn’t allowed to listen to rock and roll, let alone own a guitar—my L.A. cousin and her mother both wore platform shoes, tie-dyed outfits, and Jewish Afros. For three weeks I took in the music, the absence of bras, the wild dancing in the living room. After that visit, California remained a mythological place of freedom and pleasure in my imagination until I moved there decades later. 

These cousin stories and others, personal and fictional, were percolating in my mind as I wrote Three Cousins. After staging the adult years of two of the cousins in The Geometry of Love and Nothing Forgotten, I was pulled back to my characters’ college years. On one level, I was processing the difference between the hopeful spirit of women who came of age during second wave feminism and the bitter mood today of young women living through the deterioration of women’s rights in the United States and elsewhere. The sense that each generation of women has to wage its own battle led me to stage not only the stories of my fictional cousins, but also the stories of their mothers and the tango of generations. 

Relationships with cousins can lead to a dig into the history, architecture, and neuroses of one’s entire family. To riff on Tolstoy’s opening of Anna Karenina, all happy families are alike; every crazy family is crazy in its own way. Conversations with cousins lead to comparing parents. For girls moving toward womanhood, moms especially need to be compared–whose was wilder, braver, more critical or demanding? My cousins and I discussed our moms and our upbringings until we got to the source of something ineffable–our own craziness. Tracing it back up the family tree made us feel better about it, probably because each of us thought the other a tad crazier than the other. 

As I examined the architecture of my family, I saw the templates for womanhood that my cousins and I had inherited, adopted, and rebelled against. My cousins were (in part) the way they were because of their mothers, and I was (in part) the way I was because of mine. Three Cousins came out of my attempt to understand how we negotiate the teachings of the matriarchs. For young women to surpass their mothers, which they must, they need to decide what to discard and what to value from those lessons learned.

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Jessica Levine is the author of The Cousins Series, including Three Cousins, forthcoming in April 2025, and the critically acclaimed The Geometry of Love and Nothing Forgotten. She holds a PhD in English from the University of California, Berkeley, and has published a literary history, Delicate Pursuit: Discretion in Henry James and Edith Wharton as well as books translated from French and Italian. She has worked as a hypnotherapist since 2005. Visit her at www.jessicalevine.com

THREE COUSINS

Set during the excitement and tumult of the second wave of feminism and the sexual revolution, this coming-of-age novel about female friendship in the 1970s will appeal to fans of Kristin Hannah’s Firefly Lane.

It’s 1976, the second wave of feminism is in full swing, and three cousins share an apartment at Yale. Two are seniors; the third is starting graduate school. Each is seeking her own path in both love and work—but all three women, not quite knowing how to use the new freedoms available to them, alternate between supporting and undermining each other in their efforts.

Julia, the most conventional of the three, wants the security of her monogamous relationship but is attracted to men. Anna plans on traveling the world to escape her boyfriend and alcoholic mother. Robin, who is bisexual, has various partners as she dreams of open relationships. All fall under the spell of a charismatic musician, Michael, who is too wounded to be available. By the end of a year of experiments and necessary mistakes, the cousins will make crucial decisions that will determine the course of the rest of their lives.

This prequel to Levine’s first two critically acclaimed novels, The Geometry of Love and Nothing Forgotten, dramatizes the struggles that women have faced and continue to face while entering adulthood in a world not quite ready to accept them as equals.

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Category: On Writing