This is such a rich and profound
book that I feel I could read it again and again and still find more each time.

Sharon O’Brien, who is a professor
in American Studies and English and has written a biography of Willa Cather,
writes about her depression in the context of her family, her Irish forbears,
her education and work, and American culture. She hones in on fear of
abandonment as a major factor in the depression that afflicts her and her
family members, but also the pressures that arise from the pursuit of the
American dream.

The family silver of the title is a
magnificent and extravagant set of silver cutlery called Repoussé, consisting
of twenty place settings with eighteen pieces for each setting, and engraved
with a capital Q for Quinlan. It was purchased by O’Brien’s paternal
grandfather, Dan Quinlan (he changed his name from Cullinan), an actor and
minstrel, and his wife wept when it arrived because they had no money
otherwise. It represented for him a distancing from the poverty of his
upbringing as the child of Irish immigrants, a wiping away of the memory of the
Great Famine.

And from this delving into her
Irish background, O’Brien gathers evidence of how she comes to suffer from
depression. Her mother’s family displayed anxieties and phobias, prolonged mournings,
practiced the silences upon each other that effectively acted as banishment of
the other person. And fear of abandonment stands out as a major cause of
melancholy and anxiety in the family. The author’s grandfather banished one
daughter for marrying; the author’s mother banished a daughter for the same
reason.

This manipulation of children by
their parents is another dominant feature of O’Brien’s concern. She notes Alice
Miller’s true and false self, how a child will hide their true self in order to
conform to a parent’s demands, and present to the parent only the false self
that does what they want. She also notes Jung’s statement that the ‘Greatest
burden of a child is unlived life of the parent’. She tried to be the ‘good
daughter’, but didn’t always succeed, falling into the gap, satisfying neither
herself nor her parents. Her mother’s tyranny over the children comes across as
frightening and unreasonable, and the author comments that the banishing of her
sister was an event that ‘changed her life’, leaving her unsure of which sort
of behavior might cause her to be similarly cast off, ‘wandering in the darkness
somewhere outside the lighted circle of my family’ (29).

Her father’s family also lived with
depression. He is a more sympathetic figure than her mother, almost noble, and
deals with the years in which he was struck down with the illness in a
dignified manner. He was not afraid to discuss the fact that he was ill, and wrote
about it in his essay for the 25th reunion of his Harvard class. Silences came
into play again when he was dying, both literally and emotionally, as he is
unable to speak from his physical illness and his wife does not want him to
know the full extent of his prognosis. This is a traumatic time, and O’Brien
writes of it with grace and frankness, in a way that enlightens the reader,
takes them into the pain of the experience.

O’Brien is especially critical of
the pursuit of the American dream, success and upward mobility: she ‘wanted to
understand how our depressions, shared and unshared, were linked up with
American culture’ (152). She understands why her forbears would want to escape
the poverty of Famine Ireland, but sees how the constant striving for material
success and improvement can put damaging pressures upon people. And if they
don’t happen to succeed, or are driven off course by illness, as her father
was, then the result can be devastating.

Her writing is easy to read,
engaging, imaginative, thoughtful. Her language for depression is expressive:
‘dark clotted lake’, ‘enormous toad’, ‘soul-crusher’. She uses metaphor
intelligently and convincingly. The chapter entitled ‘The Book of Lists’
contains a moving examination of her mother’s disjunction with her times, how
she made herself small and wrote in cheap, ‘narrow-ruled’ notebooks, how even
her name was diminished, from ‘Regina’ the queen to the weaker ‘Jean’. O’Brien
writes:

‘Regina coeli is the famous Catholic poem-prayer to
Mary, the "queen of the skies." I kept wondering what skies my mother
could have flown in if she’d only been born at a later time, a time when women
were allowed to soar.’ (142)

There is so much contained within this
memoir that it is difficult to fully convey its depth, compassion and delight.
It is not only a book beautifully written and shaped, but one of immense value
to all who struggle with depression (and life generally) and seek to
understand.

© 2006 Sue Bond

Sue Bond has degrees in medicine and
literature and a Master of Arts in Creative Writing. Reviews for online and
print publications. She lives in Queensland,  Australia.

Categories: Depression, Memoirs