Review of The Family Silver: A Memoir of Depression and Inheritance (Hardcover)

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!

Product Description
Finding herself struggling with depression ("like a rude houseguest, coming and going of its own accord"), Sharon O'Brien set out to understand its origins beyond the biochemical explanations and emotional narratives prevailing in contemporary American culture. Her quest for her inheritance took her straight into the pressures and possibilities of American culture, and then to the heart of her family-the generations who shaped and were shaped by one another and their moment in history. In The Family Silver, as O'Brien travels into her family's past, she goes beyond depression to discover courage, poetry, and grace.

A compassionate and engaging writer, O'Brien uses the biographer's methods to understand her family history, weaving the scattered pieces of the past-her mother's memo books, her father's reading journal, family photographs, tombstones, dance cards, hospital records, the family silver-into a compelling narrative. In the lives of her Irish-American relatives she finds that the American values of upward mobility, progress, and the pressure to achieve sparked both desire and depression, following her family through generations, across the sea, from the Irish famine of the 1840s to Harvard Yard in the late 1960s.

"Many people who write stories of depression or other chronic illnesses tell tales of recovery in the upward-mobility sense, the 'once I was ill, but now I am well' formula that we may find appealing, but doesn't match the messiness of our lives," she writes. "Mine is not such a tale. But it is a recovery tale in another sense-a story of salvage, of rescuing stories from silence." Told with humor and honesty, O'Brien's story will captivate all readers who want to know how they, and their families, have been shaped by the past.

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