cover image Mother in the Middle: A Biologist's Story of Caring for Parent and Child

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

Sybil Lockhart, . . Touchstone, $25 (310pp) ISBN 978-1-4165-4155-4

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)