Drew Martin was one of six children born to a newspaper editor and a writer, raised in a rundown Victorian house connected to a psychiatric halfway house in a rough neighborhood on Staten Island’s North Shore. Their minds were nourished, but their emotional needs were largely neglected. Their unusually polished speech set them apart from the neighborhood kids, who dubbed them the “Ghetto Aristocrats.”

Their childhood was shaped by an Irish Catholic mother struggling with mental illness and a Pennsylvania Dutch father whose warmth and optimism were tempered by an aversion to conflict, often leaving the children to navigate the family turmoil on their own. Against a backdrop of poverty, racial tensions, street violence, crime, fierce sibling rivalries and equally fierce loyalties emerged. Each child developed a different strategy for survival: achievement, toughness, invisibility, avoidance, humor, or escape.

At the center of the memoir is Paul, Drew’s charismatic older brother, protector, and childhood hero, who gradually becomes his nemesis and burden as he turns increasingly to alcohol to self-medicate his mental illness. Paul’s downward spiral forces Drew to confront the childhood he believed he had left behind.

Drew’s journey takes him from Lancaster to Staten Island, upstate New York, San Diego, and Europe with scenes ranging from cornfields in Amish country, NYC basketball courts, burned out tenements, Catholic school classrooms, cemeteries, corporate boardrooms, surfing sessions, the Irish countryside, therapists offices in Switzerland, and a Camino pilgrimage in Spain. Along the way come marriage, fatherhood, divorce, therapy, and an overdue reckoning with family trauma. He begins to recognize that the survival instincts that helped him escape his childhood and achieve professional success have also exacted a personal toll.

The Ghetto Aristocrats explores questions that extend far beyond one eccentric family. How much of who we become is determined by fate, and how much by our own choices? Why do some people adapt while others break? And can we ever truly escape the childhood that made us?

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.