"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."--BOOK JACKET.