Daughter of the Queen of Sheba: A Memoir [Paperback]

Jacki Lyden (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 1, 1998

As an adult, National Public Radio foreign correspondent Jacki Lyden has spent her life on the front lines of some of the #151; she's tired of hearing her relatives talk about the past. But when she opens the front door to symbolically welcome the prophet Elijah, she's transported to a Polish village in the year 1942, where she becomes caught up in the tragedy of the time. "[Readers] will come away with a sense of tragic history that both disturbs and compels."— Booklist

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com 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. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

In this colorful memoir, Lyden, senior correspondent for National Public Radio, describes her early life as the daughter of a mother suffering from manic depression. In her manic states, Dolores Lyden had delusions of power and acted on them. She was the Queen of Sheba, a hostess of bizarre dinner parties, a promoter of outrageous business ventures. Dolores's imaginative escapades inspired Lyden in her career as a journalist covering the Persian Gulf War, taking risks, rising to challenges, and facing unforeseen danger. As her illness progressed, Dolores defied every attempt made by her daughters to force her to seek treatment until she was finally arrested for assaulting a judge at a court hearing. Lyden has written a brilliantly descriptive, fast-moving tribute to her mother's vanquished eccentric alter ego. Recommended for public libraries.
-?Lucille M. Boone, San Jose P.L., Cal.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 257 pages
• Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics); Later Printing edition (October 1, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 014027684X
• ISBN-13: 978-0733609022
• Product Dimensions: 7.6 x 5 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (29 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #314,169 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Another Beautiful Mind, November 14, 2003

By 

W. Walton (Maine) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Daughter of the Queen of Sheba: A Memoir (Paperback)

I am saddened to find so many unfavorable reviews of this memoir. Reading it, I was reminded of "Angela's Ashes," "A Beautiful Mind" and "Growing Up." I found Lyden's prose both poetic and evocative. I thought she portrayed her own family and herself with remarkable journalistic perspective, but also with compassion. I am amazed at the extent of Lyden's success in her attempt to describe her mother's mania, as well as the author's candor about her own life. There's no self-indulgence in these pages, only a long and difficult distance bravely traveled and recounted for us, so we can see the terrain through her eyes. To the critical reviewers, I say, "Let us read your life," and to Ms. Lyden an unequivocal, "Bravo."

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Been There Done That, April 3, 2000

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"animzmirot" - See all my reviews

This review is from: Daughter of the Queen of Sheba: A Memoir (Paperback)

I have lived this book. My mother is bipolar and living with her was an unbelievably difficult and sad experience. Jacki Lyden so beautifully chronicles the ups and downs of living with a mother who one day seems normal, and then can change to someone so unpredictable that as a child you lose all sense of yourself. Recovering from a childhood with a bipolar mother is not to be taken lightly, and Jacki Lyden gave me the inspiration to move forward and leave the demons of my past behind. An excellent book on living with someone you live who is mentally ill.

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars (3.5) A dark and haunting tale..., October 3, 2001

By 

Luan Gaines "luansos" (Dana Point, CA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Daughter of the Queen of Sheba: A Memoir (Paperback)

To travel this memoir with the author, the reader gains some small comprehension of life with a bi-polar personality and how the illness dominates a family, shrinking everyone else into insignificance. Bi-polar disorder or manic depression is a phenomenon recently addressed by a number of women in their memoirs, or any of a myriad of dysfunctional behaviors that tear at the fabric of family structure.

In the severest cases a role reversal takes place early in the daughter's life, predictably long before the child has even defined herself. Literally, the child is forced by circumstance to relinquish her childhood; by its very nature, this confusion enables the mother to continue the destructive behavior at the expense of the entire family unit. The price is enormous, as each sibling spends years as an adult trying to recover the child within, forced to be nurturer rather than nurtured. This usurpation of childhood is probably more common than it would appear to an observer because family members cover for eachother, creating a united front.

While Lyden paints a vivid picture of the desolation of mental illness, by far the more heartbreaking reality is the years of confusion ahead for the daughter, whose own behavior may have become more risky and outrageous in an effort to compensate. The mother's legacy is a few moments of pure joy in a lifetime of painful distortion.

I found the book truthful and brutally honest, until the last chapter. By then I knew everything I ever wanted to know about Lyden's mother. The final chapter, "The Queen of Sheba", seemed to wrap the package in a bow, as if to say, "See how clever she is, even in her delusions?" At that point I was exhausted by Lyden's mother and her terminal uniqueness. The debris left in the wake of her chaos leaves nothing to the imagination. The memoir spoke entirely to me of a woman's struggle to survive her childhood, warts and all, to purchase a sense of self from the remains.