From Scarsdale: A Childhood

From Scarsdale is an evocative and lyrical memoir of a haunted childhood in Scarsdale, New York.

With a life-threatening diagnosis in his early forties, the author is compelled to revisit and resolve the mystery of his family’s sadness. The fourth of six children in an Irish American household distinctly out-of-place in an affluent suburb of New York City, O’Brien grows up in a claustrophobic milieu of secrecy, lies, and mental illness. The turning point in his maturation is an older brother’s attempted suicide—an event he witnesses firsthand.

From Scarsdale traces with sensitivity the complex histories and dynamics that lead to this trauma, as O’Brien investigates the psychologies of his parents, themselves the survivors of painful childhoods in Scarsdale. Then, simultaneously disturbed and catalyzed by his brother’s depression, and his own developing obsessive-compulsive disorder, the adolescent O’Brien discovers literature and the theatre as an escape, though it will take years for an actual liberation to occur. In many ways this memoir is that liberation, as his ambition here has been to tell “the story of who I am and where I’m from, with honesty, insight, and something like forgiveness. To try to leave the old place behind.”

REVIEWS

"By turns sad and bleakly comic . . . a fine, evocative memoir of a suburban 1980s childhood."

—James Cook, Times Literary Supplement

“[A] searing memoir . . . Part family investigation, part liberating tale of artistic discovery, O’Brien’s From Scarsdale is a lyrical testament to what is survivable. Fans of O’Brien’s A Story That Happens (Dalkey Archive Press, 2021) and The House in Scarsdale (Bloomsbury, 2019) will enjoy the ache and hope of his latest work.”

—New England Review

"From Scarsdale is an active refutation of the notion that things, moments, and people, less than beautiful, can’t be written about with beauty"

—Will Zimmerman, The Key Reporter