New memoir · Out now
O'Leary House
A Sow's Ear and a Silk Purse
Maureen Ellen O'Leary
We are packing up and moving on. Two adults. Seven children. And one mangy parakeet. It is the late summer of 1954, and we are on our way. We are going down in the world.
Paperback & ebook · Atmosphere Press · October 27, 2026
“We are going down in the world.”Late summer, 1954
When Maureen Ellen O’Leary finally breaks the silence surrounding her family’s years in The Place That Shall Not Be Named, she finds more than the shame she carried for decades. Treasure, she discovers, sat alongside the skeletons in the family closet.
O’Leary House: A Sow’s Ear and a Silk Purse returns to public housing in Massachusetts in the mid-1950s and early ’60s. In the crowded rooms and lively courtyards of Huron Place, trouble and worry were part of daily life, but so were exuberance, playmates galore, music, mischief, and fun. In energetic, graceful prose, O’Leary tells not only her own family’s story, but the stories of the neighbors who helped make her childhood unforgettable.
Tender, funny, and clear-eyed, this memoir reveals that life in “the projects” was both a sow’s ear and a silk purse, a place of hardship, connection, and stories well worth telling.
- Publisher
- Atmosphere Press
- Published
- October 27, 2026
- Pages
- 196
- ISBN (paperback)
- 9798901744895
About Maureen
A Boston transplant and longtime English professor with a Ph.D. from Berkeley, Maureen writes essays and poems that have appeared in the Financial Times, Hemispheres, The Chronicle Review, The East Bay Monthly, and California Quarterly. She lives in Oakland with her husband.