Grumpa "quit his job" when convicted of criminal fraud; Writes unpublished book

"He sent chapters of the book to all of his friends in the Bronx, and it made a few of them so angry that they stopped talking to him. The book was never published. My father had no idea how to get such a thing off the ground"

Here is an excerpt of Aunt Brie's blog from October 9, 2014:

The Beginning of the End of Something

October 9, 2014

"In Sligo, a seaside town with a fantastic ferris wheel, my mother woke us up in the middle of the night, and made us catch an early plane home. When we all returned to New York, my Uncle Michael checked into rehab. “He’s gone to summer camp,” my mother told us. When we visited, my mother left us in the car. I knew what was up. “He’s in rehab,” I told my other siblings.

The rest of the alcoholics in the family got sober soon after. At family parties, rather than serving beer with our take-out Italian food, my aunts served soft drinks. Addiction can have an expiration date when sobriety becomes your normal. To me, recovery from alcoholism seemed like a rite of passage into adulthood.

In seventh grade, my father quit his job on Wall Street. In the mornings, he worked on a book about his life in an office my mom set up for him in one of our guest rooms. In the afternoons, he picked us up from school. At night, he went to a meeting, and then put himself to sleep with Trollope. “Oh, so he’s an autodidact,” a condescending person once said when I told them how my father educated himself. He sent chapters of the book to all of his friends in the Bronx, and it made a few of them so angry that they stopped talking to him. The book was never published. My father had no idea how to get such a thing off the ground. After two years, he returned to a commuter job working at a bank in midtown Manhattan. “I get depressed being at home,” he explained.

I didn’t feel any pressure to drink myself, not when my friends in eighth grade began stealing beers and cigarettes from their parents. Not when people made fun of me in high school for being a dork. “I can’t try it, I have alcoholism in my family,” I told them. I was happy with candy and chicken cutlet sandwiches from the local deli where everyone hung out in high school. So much was forbidden to me that I needed very little to make me happy."

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