Daughter of the Queen of Sheba
by Jacki Lyden
List Price: $12.95
Pages: 257
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 014027684X
Publisher: Penguin USA
Jacki Lyden is known to many as a foreign correspondent for National Public
Radio, a vocation which has brought her to the front lines of some of
the world's most precarious regions. But in this memoir, she tells
of the precariousness of her childhood and of her struggles growing up
with her manic depressive mother. Beautiful, with a quick imagination
and a constant yearning for a wider life than the one she was offered
in her small Wisconsin town, Dolores Lyden filled her daughters' lives
with the uncertainty that comes from parental instability. Her divorce
from her first husband, a man who was dearly loved by his three daughters,
was the initial blow to their family life. But her subsequent, and ultimately
destructive marriage to a wealthy physician triggered the primary episode
of Dolores' manic depression—and sent Jacki and her sisters lives'
into a freefall of confusion and chaos that would last for two decades.
Jacki never knew how and when
her mother's sickness would take hold. It was the 1960s, and the concept
of the "mad housewife" hadn't quite swept the American consciousness.
Nor had the realities of spousal abuse. The Doctor's cruel treatment
of Dolores' daughters, especially Jacki, forced Dolores to make a
choice between her daughters' welfare and her marriage. It was a choice
difficult enough to drive any woman crazy and quite possibly brought about
the onset of Dolores' mental illness. As a teenager and a young woman
struggling to find her place in the world, Jacki was forced to become
a parent to her own parent at a time when she could have benefited from
a mother's good sense. She turned instead to her grandmother, Mabel,
a hardscrabble woman who'd suffered enormous losses of her own yet
managed to live happily on her own terms—a woman whom many wouldn't
have hesitated to call crazy. The influences of these two powerful women
instilled in the Lyden daughters an appreciation of their lives' unpredictability.
But it also instilled in them a determination to make their way in an
uncertain world, and helped them appreciate the force of their own imaginations—a
force which, sadly, often got the better of their mother.
Jacki grew to accept, and even
relish, the manifestations of her mother's illness. In her memoir
she marvels at her mother's creative energy, at the intricate workings
of the extraordinary mind that took Dolores to such exotic places as Mesopotamia
or eighteenth-century France. Later, Jacki would become a traveler in
her own right, more at home in the unsettled territory of the Middle East
than with the comfort that comes from a quiescent life. As a journalist
covering the front lines of some of the world's most dangerous war
zones, Jacki's chaotic childhood experiences have allowed her to comprehend
the insanity that prevails in so many peoples' lives. Hers was not,
perhaps, a childhood she would have chosen, but it's the only one
she knows. And so, in this hilarious, lyrical, and achingly beautiful
tribute we come to know Dolores, to empathize with Jacki, and to revel
in an unusually moving story about mothers, daughters, and growing up.
top of the page
1. Lyden says she was a diarist from the time she could write. How do you think writing helped her cope with her mother's illness? How may her mother's illness have contributed to Jacki's talent for writing?
2. Lyden writes "My life as her daughter, the life of my imagination, began with my mother's visions . . . Her madness was our narrative line. I am trying to decipher that line still, for its power and meaning over our past." What does this say about the way imagination and personality develop? How much are we the product of our parents' lives, and how much the product of our environment? Why do you think Dolores' illness prodded Jacki toward such dangerous assignments? How would it have contributed to Kate's unconventional lifestyle, and Sarah's craving for order in her own life?
3. Dolores didn't exhibit signs of mental illness until after her second marriage. How much of a role do you think her relationships with men, including her father, played in Dolores' illness?
4. Lyden often makes references to the pressures she felt protecting her mother, usually not the role of a daughter. How do you think this role reversal affected Jacki's adolescence? In what ways was Dolores a good mother to Jacki?
5. What do you think of Jacki's grandmother, Mabel? What were her strengths and weaknesses? How did she influence Jacki's life?
6. In the throes of her illness, Dolores is incredibly creative and energetic, and Lyden has preserved many of the notes and letters Dolores wrote to everyone from her lawyers to her daughters. Why do you think Lyden wants to hold on to these artifacts of her mother's illness? What do they tell her about who her mother really is?
7.As a child Jacki learned to tolerate not only her mother's erratic behavior, but her stepfather's cruel ways. Lyden writes, "the armed hands of children do not surprise me in the least. Children are fierce, without nuance or hesitation." What do you think allows children to withstand trauma; what makes them so resilient and fierce?
8. Lyden claims that she has been "drawn to men with despotic natures...A desperado helps one live dangerously, and perhaps that is how we know we are alive." Do you think Lyden's predilection for violent men had its roots in Dolores' relationship with the Doctor? If so, why wouldn't Jacki have learned the danger of being involved in those types of relationships instead of being attracted to them?
9. In the chapter, "Teotihuacán, Mexico, 1960," Lyden describes an incident in which she climbed an Aztec pyramid and tried to imagine what it would have been like to be a young girl about to be sacrificed at the altar. She strays so far into this daydream that she feels as if she had passed directly into ancient history—a sensation she likens to her mother's own periods of insanity. Why is this episode significant? What is Lyden saying about the delusions of the mentally ill as compared to the fierce imaginings of a young girl?
10. Lyden describes her and her sisters' childhood as "growing up like bumper cars in an arcade—the brakes applied harshly and erratically here, and no brakes or direction at all there... Growing up in Ping-Pong trajectories that no one else could follow, perversely desirable because our experience would protect us in dangerous situations." How different do you think her experience was from other girls her age? Was Jacki's childhood insecure or unconventional? What are the advantages and disadvantages of an unconventional upbringing?
top of the page
"One of the most indelible portraits of a mother-daughter relationship to come along in years, a book that belongs on the shelf of classic memoirs, alongside The Liars' Club by Mary Karr and Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt... A book that stands, remarkably, as both a reporter's unsentimental act of recollection and a love letter to an impossible and captivating woman. "
—Michiko Kakutani, The New York
Times
"The great strength in Lyden's memoir lies not only in the story it tells of madness, imagination and the tough bonds among three generations of women, but also in the poetic power and virtuosity of the language with which the story is told... A beautiful family testament. "
—Chicago Tribune
"Lyden's lucid, powerful prose makes her psychic drama real and vivid. "
—Newsday
"The story will resonate with anyone who has struggled with a mentally ill family member. "
—USA Today
"Lyden captures her mother's insanity and her own response to it in exquisite detail. The writing—vivid, original, lyrical—shines at its most haunting, when Lyden homes in on her mother's behavior, which is so bold and fantastical at times that it borders on the hilarious. "
—The New York Times Book Review
