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The family silver : a memoir of depression and inheritance Cover Image

The family silver : a memoir of depression and inheritance / Sharon O'Brien

O'Brien, Sharon (Author).

Summary:

"Finding herself struggling with depression (which, "like a rude houseguest," would come and go of its own accord), Sharon O'Brien set out to understand the origins of depression within her family, not willing to rely on the biochemical explanations and psychological accounts that prevail in contemporary American culture. Her quest took her straight into the pressures and possibilities of the American dream as it was experienced in the heart of her family - the generations who shaped and were shaped by one another and their moment in history. In The Family Silver, O'Brien travels deep into her family's past, going beyond the legacy of depression to discover courage, poetry, and grace."

"O'Brien uses the biographer's methods to understand her own family's history, weaving the scattered pieces of the past - her mother's diaries and memo books, her father's reading journal, family photographs, tombstones, dance cards, hospital records, the family silver - into a story of remembrance and redemption. In the lives of her Irish American relatives, she finds that the American values of upward mobility, progress, and the pressure to achieve created both desire and depression that followed her family through generations, across the sea from the Irish famine of the 1840s to Harvard Yard in the late 1960s."--Jacket

Record details

ISBN: 0226616649
ISBN: 9780226616643
Physical Description: xv, 339 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm
Publisher: Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2004

Content descriptions

Formatted Contents Note:

Looking for Elmira -- Shipwreck -- Friends -- The First Time -- Handsome Dan -- Danny Boy -- A Nice Irish Catholic Girl -- A Town of Homes -- The Bedroom -- The Book of Ruth -- Catalogues -- Departed Acts -- No Shrinking Violet -- My Mother's Willa Cather -- The Aptitude to Fly -- The Book of Lists -- Part Two -- You Don't Always Get What You Want -- Veritas -- Between Two Worlds -- In the Shadow of Harvard -- The Stations of the Cross -- Losing It -- Getting through the Day -- The Great City of Lowell -- Letters from London -- Depressives in the Lounge -- REcovery Stories -- You'll Never Work in this Town Again -- Order of Dances -- Wash Your Way Out -- The Bookmark or the Rose -- REading Dickens to My Father -- Family Gathering -- Elephant Skin -- Class of 1927 -- Part Three -- Remember Kibbereen