Mother in the Middle: A Biologist's Story of Caring for Parent and Child (Hardcover)

~ (Author)
Key Phrases: Sybil Lockhart, Nurse Carol, San Francisco (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. In this impressive debut memoir, Lockhart, a former UC-Berkeley neurobiologist, chronicles her struggle to raise two daughters while tending her own mother, rapidly deteriorating from Alzheimer's. A masterful storyteller and lyrical in describing biological processes, Lockhart renders perceptive family portraits, tracing how the mundane movements that anchor everyday life—driving to the grocery store, making coffee, folding laundry—can warp when stymied by dementia, and strain even the strongest relationships: The distress Ma projects when her schedule is disrupted infects me immediately. Lockhart treats her mother's mental unraveling as a painful foil to the budding vitality of her own growing family, but it is the intense relationship with her mother that emerges as the book's central duet. For all her fascination with the minute workings of neurobiology and the development and decline of the brain, Lockhart suggests how easily her scientific knowledge is thwarted by her denial as a daughter. The question of who is the parent and who is the child—asked by so many dealing with Alzheimer's—remains unsettled long after Lockhart's drama arrives at its honest, if startling, conclusion. (Feb. 3)
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Review

"Sybil Lockhart's insights as a neurobiologist and a daughter watching her mother disintegrate from dementia are meaningful and poignant -- and her writing about mothering her own daughters equally so. In the midst of the pain are uplifting lessons and a new map for living with the illness of a loved one."-- Richard M. Cohen, New York Times bestselling author of Blindsided and Strong at the Broken Places --This text refers to the Kindle Edition edition.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Touchstone; 1 edition (February 3, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1416541551
• ISBN-13: 978-1416541554
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.8 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (24 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #549,437 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Will resonate with every working mother..., February 17, 2009

By	Monica J. Kern (Lexington, KY United States) - See all my reviews

(What's this?)

This is a nicely written memoir of one woman's struggle to balance work and family obligations and the pain of seeing one's mother's slow but inexorable deterioration through Alzheimer's disease. What makes this memoir noteworthy is that it is half memoir and half neuroscience primer; Lockhart is a neurobiologist and writes of the changes occurring within the brains of her children and her mother with a dispassionate eye while simultaneously being able to convey the anguish of watching a loved one succumb to a truly nasty disease. This merging of science and memoir makes this book distinctive, but I am not convinced it was entirely successful. Readers who are curious about the inner workings of the brain will find the science digressions interesting and informative; others who care primarily about Lockhart's narrative may find the digressions overly long and intrusive.

I was impressed by the raw honesty Lockhart was able to express about some of life's most personal and private relationships. She relates arguments with her husband with an immediacy that I almost felt like an uncomfortable eavesdropper, but I found in those passages the echo of all my own complicated ambivalence about attempting to Do It All as a working mom. And perhaps the aspect of the book I found most heartrending and compelling was Lockhart's admission that she felt angry at her mother for not being the mother she wanted her to be. Most of us, if we are honest with ourselves, have had similar feelings at one point or another. Reading Lockhart's journey as she confronted and ultimately adapted to her conflicting emotions helped me to recognize and process those feelings in myself--and that is a hallmark of a worthy book.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Been there, doing that?, January 27, 2009

By	Judith Paley (Denver, CO) - See all my reviews

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Kids to the left of me, my husband to the right, here I am
Stuck in the middle with you.
(My apologies to Egan and Rafferty)

That's an entire generation of us; on the one side teens testing our resolve (or, in Lockhart's case, kids so small they're just now learning to walk and talk!) and, on the other, an aging parent or two fraying our nerves. If you have been there, are currently doing that, or realize that you will go down that road some time in the future, this book validates, informs, and prepares. All of it, the wildly conflicting emotions, the mad dash out the door of your work to your parent's home, the frantic phone calls, the more or less tolerant spouse waiting at home--there's no dilemma or emotion Ms. Lockhart leaves unshared.

But, as a twist to yet another Sandwich Generation expose, the author brings the unique perspective of a neurobiologist in the middle--developing brains to the left and degenerating brains to the right (and do check out "Memory Lessons" by Jerald Winakur for a physician's take on this old, demented parent thing). I wish Ms. Lockhart had more deftly woven her scholarly brain text into her seamless personal narrative--at times they meld perfectly but sometimes there's too many paragraphs of physiology stuck in the pages with you. That said, just scan the parts that are a little too dry, and DO NOT MISS the last fifty pages. They're perfect!

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A beautifully written book, January 25, 2009

By	Suzanne Amara (MA) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)

(What's this?)

This book was so much more than I expected. I figured it would be an interesting viewpoint, a biologist explaining Alzheimer's and contrasting it with the development of her young girls. That is was, but in a lyrical and moving way, with much more to the story. I had worried it would have a structure I have come to really dislike, that of one chapter about the "now" alternating with one about pure science, with not enough of either. Instead, the science is blending in, and this is much more memoir than science, although I did learn a lot from what I read.

The best part of this book, for me, was the honesty. Sybil Lockhart doesn't shy away from really exposing what she felt about caring for her mother---the intense love but also the irritation, the anger, the denial and the despair. She also is honest about the affects of her mother's illness on her marriage, and even that there is more to that to the tension she has with her husband. She also talks so wonderfully about the feelings we can have for a house, as she sells her childhood home. There is even much here about that never-ending conflict between career and mothering.

I think when Lockhart became a biologist, it was probably lucky for that field, but I think she is a rare example of someone that really was meant to be a writer. It is probably lucky she wasn't one from the start, however, because her writing avoids the feeling so many memoirs have, that was written long along in her mind and in college classes, and that she was just waiting for a life event to pin it on. This is real writing, and I hope she writes much more.