It’s Like This

At 18, Jack O’Brien fought in the 45th Infantry from Sicily to the Nazi border. He was shot stabbed, blown up by a hand grenade and was with his two best friends when they were killed. Returning stateside, he attended the Arts Student League of NYC where he met his soulmate Susan Barberian O’Brien. As an ecclesiastical muralist, he painted the ceilings and walls of churches, cathedrals and one State House throughout the east and northeast U.S. He drank heavily, fought often and loved one woman. For a while, John and Susan were NYC powerhouse of artistic talent, as she became a fashion illustrator for Anne Klein and others. In the early 1960s a coke bottle shattered and severed the nerves in his hand making climbing scaffolds impossible. He worked the Macy’s Day parade, the World Expo and other events in his art as a supervisor. In 1970, he and Susan had moved to Toronto, Canada with their young family and he rented a tiny Spartan studio in Markham Village near Bloor Street and began a torrent of writing that would last more than three years. In the office was a single bed, a hook for his coat and an overturned wooden fruit basket he used as a desk. he wrote for catharsis to try to exorcize the demons of the war that tormented him. He brought a unique artists pallet of colors, compositions and textures to make readers ’feel’ like they were with him in the battle, in the bedroom or in his mind. Soon he was elected President of the Canadian Writer’s Guild, though American, and often could be found in small packed venues reading his poetry and stories to to hushed and awed crowds. He never published though he was offered contract. Slowly, the burden of the memories of the war lifted and he stopped writing. In all he wrote Dog Star, about the war, It’s Like This, a book of poetry about life, love and death, the Golden Gumball on growing up in depression in a tight knit family in NYC and Terminal Assassins, his only fictional work which features veteran cancer patients, terminal, who form a group of assassins who target the heads of organized crime, corporate criminals and other untouchables. Years later in Florida he penned Valhalla Lost. John Joseph O’Brien (Jack O’Brien) was the center of attention in any room he entered. He could be bombastic, powerful, brilliant, outrageously funny and abrasive. He was, above all things, a consummate artist and life-long mate of Susan. THIS book, It’s Like This, is written directly to you, the reader, as if you are sitting there in his tiny Spartan studio hearing his first draft.