Raised in a crumbling Victorian house connected to a psychiatric halfway house in a sketchy area in the north shore of Staten Island, Drew Martin and his five siblings grew up as the neighborhood’s Ghetto Aristocrats. They are children of a newspaper editor and a writer who nurtured them intellectually but otherwise neglected them. Their home was intellectually rich but emotionally chaotic. They are shaped by parental neglect, a mother’s mental illness, a passive father, sibling rivalries and loyalties, poverty, racial tension and street violence. Each child tries different ways to survive through combinations of achievement, toughness, invisibility, avoidance, humor, and escape. 

At the center of the memoir is Paul, Drew’s charismatic older brother, protector, hero, and Drew’s eventual nemesis and burden as he increasingly self-medicates his mental illness with alcohol. Paul’s decent into alcoholism forces Drew to reconsider the childhood he thought he had outrun. From Staten Island to San Diego and from Cornell engineering to professional basketball, corporate success, marriage, fatherhood, divorce, therapy, and a reckoning with family trauma, Drew begins to see that his survival tactics had shaped him and saved him but also held him back. 

  Darkly funny, unsentimental, and tender, the memoir explores how love and damage can coexist in one family and despite however effective different survival tactics may be, they all come at a cost. 

  Eventually the bill comes due.