Daughter of the Queen of Sheba : A Memoir

This account of growing up with a mentally ill mother "belongs on a shelf of classic memoirs, alongside The Liars' Club and Angela's Ashes " (Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times ). As a foreign correspondent for NPR, 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 Wisconsin town, her mother was simply called crazy. In her delusions, she was a woman with power: Marie Antoinette or the Queen of Sheba. In her real life, she had married the nefarious local doctor, who drugged her to check her moods and terrorized the children to keep them quiet. Holding their lives together was Jacki's hardscrabble Irish grandmother, a woman who had her first child at the age of fourteen and lost her husband in a barroom brawl. Lyden vividly captures the seductive... This account of growing up with a mentally ill mother “belongs on a shelf of classic memoirs, alongside The Liars'Club and Angela's Ashes” (Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times). As an NPR correspondent, Jacki Lyden visited some dangerous war zones—but her childhood was a war zone of a different kind. Lyden's mother suffered from what is now called bipolar disorder or manic depression. But in a small Wisconsin town in the sixties and seventies she was simply “crazy.” In her delusions, Lyden's mother was a woman of power: Marie Antoinette or the Queen of Sheba. But in reality, she had married the nefarious local doctor, who drugged her to keep her moods in check and terrorized the children to keep them quiet. Holding their lives together was Lyden's hardscrabble Irish grandmother, a woman who had her first child at the age of fourteen and lost her husband in a barroom brawl. In this memoir, Lyden vividly captures the seductive energy of her mother's delusions and the effect they had on her own life. She paints a portrait of three remarkable women—mother, daughter, and grandmother—revealing their obstinate devotion to one another against all odds, and their scrappy genius for survival. “What distinguishes Daughter of the Queen of Sheba from any other book about dysfunctional parents... and turns this exotic memoir into compelling literature is the dreamy poetry of Lyden's prose. In graceful imagery as original (and occasionally as highly wrought) as her mother's costumes, Lyden—a senior correspondent for National Public Radio—loops and loops again around the central fact of her mother's manic depression and how that illness shaped Lyden's life growing up with two younger sisters, a scrappy Irish grandmother (whose memory she holds like ‘a cotton rag around a cut'), a father who left, and a hated stepfather.” —Entertainment Weekly 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 fourteen and lost her husband in a barroom brawl. Jacki eventually set out on her own impassioned journeys - if her mother could escape to exotic places, so would she. In her twenties she joined a low-rent rodeo. Later, as a radio journalist, she interviewed Yasir Arafat and maneuvered her way through Baghdad at the height of the Persian Gulf War, her reports from faraway lands strangely echoing her mother's travels of the mind. This memoir is a mother-daughter story of the most deeply moving kind, a testimony to obstinate devotion in the face of bewildering illness. Jacki Lyden recalls her calamitous childhood with a child's aching regret and an adult's keen wisdom. In this memoir Jacki Lyden recalls her mother's first nervous breakdown, when she imagined that she was the queen of Sheba and had bequeathed Mesopotamia to her daughter. While her mother journeyed through manic-depressive states, Jacki became a foreign correspondent and traveled to actual faraway places "MY MOTHER'S HAND was open like a bisque cup, all porcelain, and Christ Jesus' fingers were tentacles entangled around her palm." The memoirs of senior NPR correspondent Jacki Lyden growing up in a small Wisconsin town during the sixties