Customer Reviews

The Family Silver: A Memoir of Depression and Inheritance

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I LOVED this book. Once I started reading, I couldn't put it down.

I grew up in the same Boston suburb as the author, in a family spiraling in similar downward economic mobility, and I'm about the same age as the author, so many of her experiences mirrored my own. Her mirror brought me surprising clarity and compassion with regard to my parents' struggles and the impact their struggles had on my own growing up.

I'm a psychologist now. When I look at this book from my professional viewpoint, as someone who treats and writes about depression, I also feel that it's a terrific resource. I will be recommending it to adults I treat for recurrent depressive episodes.

The author's depressions started when she was an adolescent, and continued intermittently through much of her adult life. Watching her gain understanding and mastery over this depressive tendency gave me a deeper understanding of how I can help the depressed individuals with whom I work.

BRAVO to the author, and thanks!

O'Brien has written a "Memoir of Depression and Inheritance" and she succeeds brilliantly in all of these intentions. This book works beautifully as a memoir, evoking in three dimensions, in colour and almost with smells and sounds, the world of upper-middle class expectations and genteel failure and the anxieties of her parents, and the alternative world of Elmira, which to me has the ring of a magic land. The people - mother, father, siblings, aunts - are whole and understandable and believable and sympathetic. The whole world within which the author strives to grow up is real and immediate on the page.

More than a memoir, O'Brien has the ambition of understanding inheritance. Her book links behaviour and consequence and puts forward explanations and theories of action and traces the interconnecting threads that link relative with relative and past with outcome. This does not obtrude in the narrative: her skill in writing presents these insights as natural extensionds to the momentum of the absorbing story.

The inheritance that is at the centre of O'Brien's understanding is the inheritance of depression. She addresses this with subtlety - she understands, and manages to present the complexity of inheritance and upbringing, accident and fate, biochemistry and environment, individual and social history. She is also alert to the accidents of everyday life that contribute to, and often trigger depression. I love her " `occasions of depression' which the vulnerable among us need to avoid or manage carefully." (p. 159) on the analogy of the "occasions of sin" that beset the unwary Roman Catholic.

The framework for a real humane psychology should be biography, and the complex threads through which a biography is realized. O'Brien's beautiful book is a contribution to this true science of psychology. The fact that it is contained in this insightful memoir and is presented in superb language probably means that it will never feature in psychology reading lists, but it should (though the first reviewer here gives us hope!).

"Let me get this straight. You think that if you take 10 mg of Prozac a day instead of 20 mg, you'll be twice as good a person. And if you ever had to take 40 mg a day instead of 20, you'd been twice as bad a person."

"That's it," she said.

Sharon O'Brien is a successful English professor, especially respected as a Willa Cather specialist. O'Brien also suffers from recurrent depression. A few years ago, she was working on two projects: a memoir of depression, and a history of her Irish-American family. Almost on their own, the two projects fused. The result is a magnificent book: original, touching, hilarious and even uplifting.

THE FAMILY SILVER is a work of art, blindingly well written, and as crafted and enchanting as a Joseph Cornell shadow box. That is because O'Brien is first a writer, not some actress or some doctor. Also, unlike writers of other mental disorder memoirs, O'Brien is not in love with her illness. She doesn't allow IT to define HER (it helps that her first major bout came at the onset of middle age). But in retrospect, her own depression helps her understand and form a posthumous bond with her father, a brilliant man crippled by depression in his time. The insight she slowly gains, with therapy and the help of perceptive siblings, helps her deal with the decline of a once intimidating mother.

THE FAMILY SILVER examines the many ways depression can creep on you. And I mean YOU.

-Genetic familial predisposition (Sharon's father, some aunts...)

-Family dynamics (Sharon's mother disowning her other daughter, feuding aunts)

-Matching one's parents' expectations (Sharon expected to succeed where her parents failed)

-Student stress (Harvard as a breeding ground for mood disorders)

-Unstructured time (Teenage summers, then evenings as a single woman)

-Academic pressure (Publish or perish)

-Civilization (Be it Irish, Jewish, Armenian, Black... you understand)

THE FAMILY SILVER is remarkable as well in the pitfalls it avoids. It is not a depressing read. It never elicits the "oh, cry me a river" reflex. O'Brien never wails "Why Me?" She is fully aware that she has led a basically charmed life, and that through her talent, she can turn her one lemon into the proverbial lemonade.

In case you are curious about the clever title, THE FAMILY SILVER is more than just a symbol of family dysfunction. It is a huge set of fancy repoussé silverware which O'Brien's profligate vaudevilian grandfather brought back home, to the dismay of his parcimonious wife. Aunts bickered over the never used set for a whole generation. Today, defused, it is Sharon's everyday silverware.

I am not sure exactly what I expected from "Family Silver", but chuckles and smiles were not on the list. This book engaged me in a way that a good novel does - you want to find out what happens with the folks you meet. The people portrayed are real, feeling individuals with strengths and weaknesses, not cardboard cut-outs. No matter if you have a large extended family, or just a hand full of folks who are close to you, this book will strike a chord. Those people who shaped us as children never truly leave.

I read this book for the reasons I think most people would read a book with this subtitle - to see if I could identify with the author and perhaps gain some new insight from her experience. As I progressed through it, I was amazed by the congruence of our experiences, but felt a rising call to let the author know her conclusions left me wondering how she could have missed the bigger picture, the common denominations that make it possible for her to connect with people who do not have her specific family history. Ms. O'Brien traces her depression to Irish history, specifically to simply being Irish and a descendant of the town the famine hit hardest. But my own family history has not a drop of Irish in it and I turned down page after page of parallels in her experience and mine. I wanted to tell her, "forget the Irish, already, and focus on the feelings, the reactions to loss and shame that make us all human." Another thread in her story is her almost worshipful attachment to her father. My relationship to my own was similar and I also never married. Yet, when a therapist gives her some insight into how it has affected her, she rejects completely the opportunity to learn something from it and trashes the therapist. So... I am glad I read her book, to find there are others who have lived a life very much in many ways like my own, but I don't feel I was hearing wisdom from the writer and that disappointed me.

I read this memoir to gain perspective in how a person writes about her own depression and its apparent inheritance from other family members. Unfortunately, O'Brien relates details of her own depression very little, actually making it almost 100 pages into the book before giving any specific information. In addition, while O'Brien described her family members and their dysfunction, she doesn't do much to truly detail how that dysfunction was related to actual mental health issues. Much of what O'Brien describes is typical family interaction or teenage/parent behavior. The book claims to outline the inherited traits of depression passed from her parents/grandparents to her, but in my mind, she fails to do that.

I just couldn't put this book down. This helped me understand so much about myself and my family...and how we've all been shaped by the past. O'brien's humor and warmth stay with you long after you've read the book. A must read for anyone who comes from a family.

This is a fascinating account of growing up as an Irish American in the mid 20th century told with dark Irish humor but always with love. It is one of the best accounts of the true impact of depression on the family as well as the individual. One of the best books I have read in the past year.