The secret etched into the silver

The Family Silver

A Memoir of Depression and Inheritance

Sharon O’Brien

University of Chicago Press: 340 pp., $27.50

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Yes, there is another book about depression. However, in “The Family Silver,” Sharon O’Brien offers a rewarding and thought-provoking take on what has become a bit of a cliche: a writer finding and exploring a provocative path that leads to an accepting understanding of this condition.

“I began asking questions of the dead,” she writes, describing her depression and her family history of depression. “They spoke to me in

O’Brien, the John Hope Caldwell professor of American Culture at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pa., and the author of a well-received if somewhat reductive biography of Willa Cather, tells us that she found herself in the grips of a major clinical depression: “My father’s mid-life depression began after a professional failure; mine, after a professional success. He had been fired from his job, ending a 15-year career in radio; I, a college professor with tenure -- lifetime employment! -- had published a book in 1986, a biography of Willa Cather, bringing to fruition fifteen years of work.”

Eschewing strict chronology in favor of an emotionally direct though scattered approach, O’Brien trusts her readers to put together the narrative of her life story. The book opens with the emptiness she feels -- “bereft [as] an orphan” -- in 1991 after the death of her mother from lung cancer. She lurches backward and forward through the lives of her parents, her life and the struggle to come to grips with the depression that haunts every page: “I don’t want death and silence to win.”

Steeling herself with her tools as a biographer and researcher, O’Brien assembles the lives of her mother and father. She tracks down the haunting history of the family silver: a 20-place setting (18 implements per setting) her grandfather bought at the turn of the century when he was a touring vaudeville star trying to distance himself from his Irish background. O’Brien discovers that he changed the spelling of his last name from Cullinan to Quinlan and that his monogramming of a Q on each piece of the silver marked his turning away from Ireland.

The source of the family depression, O’Brien writes, is this turning way from what being Irish meant: being heir to the silence about the effects of the Irish famine from which her grandparents had fled and to an awfulness and embarrassment that cannot be talked about. Silence begets more silence when coping with the inevitable difficulties of life in America; it becomes the root pattern for O’Brien’s and her mother’s depression.

In her father’s life and in his family’s history, O’Brien discovers the same depression rooted in the terrible silence about escaping Ireland, that cemetery of millions of uncoffined famine victims. She admires her father’s confronting his depression in a letter to his Harvard class alumni report in which he admits that his business career “all ended in a nice case of nerve exhaustion and months of unemployment....”

O’Brien grows to admire his ability to find some comfort in the spiritual writings of John Henry Cardinal Newman and Thomas a Kempis, among others.

Sigmund Freud once remarked that the goal of psychotherapy was to replace neurotic misery with common human unhappiness. Though not exactly the most optimistic of ends (given that the pursuit of happiness is a founding principle of American life), O’Brien follows Freud’s dictum in this grand reclamation project of rescuing from her family’s past, the forgotten, the uncomfortable, the fearsome and the silent.