by Dan O'Brien (Author)
From Scarsdale is an evocative and lyrical memoir of a haunted childhood in Scarsdale, New
York.
With a cancer 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 this 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."
With the specificity and aching affection of William Maxwell's Ancestors, and the
impressionistic, mosaic-like structure of Michael Ondaatje's Running in the Family, this book's
subject is ultimately, like all memoir, the solace and the conundrum of memory. From Scarsdale
is a rare book, uniquely told, and a poignant example of the redemptive power of a true story.
Author Biography
Dan O'Brien is a playwright, poet, librettist, and essayist whose recognition includes a
Guggenheim Fellowship in Drama & Performance Art and the UK's Fenton Aldeburgh Poetry
Prize. True Story: A Trilogy of O'Brien's plays was published by Dalkey Archive Press in 2023,
and in 2021 his collection of essays, A Story That Happens: On Playwriting, Childhood, & Other
Traumas, was published by Dalkey Archive in the US and by CB Editions in the UK. His poetry
collections are Survivor's Notebook, Our Cancers, New Life, Scarsdale, and War Reporter. His
plays include The Body of an American, winner of the PEN USA Award, the Edward M. Kennedy
Prize, and the Horton Foote Prize, and The House in Scarsdale, winner of a PEN America Award.
He lives in Los Angeles with his wife, the actor and writer Jessica St. Clair, and their daughter
Isobel.