Daughter of the Queen of Sheba: A Memoir - Softcover

Lyden, Jacki

Softcover

ISBN 10: 014027684X ISBN 13: 9780140276848

Publisher: Penguin Books, 1998

Synopsis

As an adult, National Public Radio foreign correspondent Jacki Lyden has spent her life on the front lines of some of the world's most dangerous war zones. As a child, she lived in a war zone of a different kind. Her mother, Dolores, suffered from what is now called manic depression; but when Jacki was growing up in a small Midwestern town, Dolores was simply called crazy. In her manic phases, Dolores became Marie Antoinette or the Queen of Sheba, exotically delusional and frightening, yet to young Jacki also transcendent, even inspiring. In time, Jacki grew to accept, even relish, Dolores's bizarre episodes, marveling at her mother's creative energy and using it to fuel her own. Heartbreaking, hilarious, and lyrical, this memoir of a mother-daughter relationship is a testimony to obstinate devotion in the face of bewildering illness.

About this title

Review:

Black humor alternates with almost unbearable pathos in National Public Radio journalist Jacki Lyden's memoir of her mother's manic-depressive episodes. Dreadful though those periodic bouts of madness were, they also gave an unhappy housewife a sense of power and freedom that Lyden couldn't help but admire. "You could say that the life of my imagination began with my mother's visions," she writes, making connections between her profession of "find[ing] things out in places of great secrets" and her struggle to deal with her mother's illness.

From the Inside Flap:

een of Sheba,' my mother announced to me in a regal voice...You could say that my life as her daughter, the life of my imagination, began with my mother's visions...

As a foreign correspondent for National Public Radio, Jacki Lyden has spent her adult life on the frontlines in some of the most dangerous war zones in the world. Her childhood was a war zone of a different kind. Her mother suffered from what we now call manic-depression; when Jacki was a child in a small Midwestern town, her mother was simply called crazy. Jacki would return home from grade school to find her mother wrapped in a toga of bedsheets, with eyeliner hieroglyphics drawn on her arms and a tiara on her head. In her manic phases, she became a woman with power, Marie Antoinette or the Queen of Sheba; in real life, she was trapped in a destructive marriage to the villainous local doctor. With their mother beyond reach, her children turned to their hardscrabble grandmother, a woman who had her first child at age fourtee

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin Books
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 014027684X
• ISBN 13: 9780140276848
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 257