Praise for Mother in the Middle
San Francisco Chronicle (Meredith Maran)
...If anyone can make neuroscience sexy - and comprehensible to the lay (no pun intended) reader, Lockhart can, and does. Alternating between the desperation of a daughter in denial and the excitement of a scientist seeing in her own life what she has previously viewed only through her microscope's long lens, Lockhart turns her mother's disintegration, her children's blooming and even her own marriage into a kind of neurological noir thriller... read more
(Starred review)
Candid, compassionate memoir of dealing simultaneously with a newborn and a mother with Alzheimer’s. . . Lockhart’s training as a neurobiologist saturates her narrative; she adroitly explains in scientific yet accessible terminology both the development of new neurons taking place in her newborn’s body and the “sticky plaques” clogging the once-elastic receptor cells in her mother’s brain. Wry humor occasionally seeps into her portrait of such tribulations as fruitlessly attempting to find a place at work to use a breast pump or Ruthie’s random bouts of uncontrollably impulsive behavior. . .the memoir juxtaposes the joy and elation of raising a baby with the sad, painful task of caring for a dying parent. A poignantly searing fusion of heartbreak and hope.
(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)
Lisa Genova, New York Times bestselling author of Still Alice
Mother in the Middle is a caregiver's journey told from the most unique vantage point. As a neurobiologist, Sybil Lockhart reveals a fascinating view into an Alzheimer's we normally can't see -- into the very molecules and neurons gone haywire inside her mother's brain. As a daughter, Lockhart reveals her mother's Alzheimer's as she sees and feels it with unflinching honesty, empathy, and love. It is a story about losing a mother and becoming a mother, about a mother's mind, told from a daughter's heart.
Richard M. Cohen New York Times bestselling author of Blindsided and Strong at the Broken Places
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
(Five stars)
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.