The Family Silver : A Memoir of Depression and Inheritance

Rating:
Summary: A positive, often funny book about depression and family
Review: "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.

Rating:
Summary: Unexpected Reading Experience
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: A mirror into my own life
Review: 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!

Rating:
Summary: Beautifully written and full of insight
Review: 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!).