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

Sybil Lockart was a biologist at UC Berkeley before quitting her job to become a full time mother and caregiver. She writes a popular column called "Mama in the Middle" for Literary Mama Magazine (www.literarymama.com). She lives in Berkeley, California with her husband and two daughters.

Sybil Lockhart, a Berkeley neurobiologist, became a "mother in the middle" when she was pregnant with her second daughter and her mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. What makes Sybil's story different, and so powerful, is that she understood the neurological processes, by turns exciting and devastating, that were taking place in the brains of those she loved. Interweaving her scientific expertise with her own complicated emotions, she writes with elegant simplicity and breathtaking honesty about biology's inevitable, powerful effects on the people around her.

When her mother begins to show the first subtle signs of the disease that is slowly ravaging her brain, Sybil refuses to consider the possibility of dementia, insisting that all her mother needs is a daughter nearby. She relocates her young family to her beloved San Francisco Bay Area, where her memories of her mother and her childhood are deeply anchored. As Sybil sets about creating new memories against the backdrop of her past, the emerging undeniable truth about her mother's condition threatens to overwhelm her ability to maintain her career, nurture her marriage, raise her young daughter, and care for herself during her second pregnancy. Even though she appreciates the beauty of the dramatic biological processes at work inside the brains of her family members, she also understands their inevitable power, and she bravely describes the complicated emotions -- denial, rage, ambivalence, exhaustion -- that so many caregivers experience.

With a unique combination of science and intimate experience, Mother in the Middle is a story of mothers and daughters, science and creativity, and life's exquisiteintertwining of love and loss.

Publishers Weekly

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)

1. Friday Night

2. Blue Moon

3. Telephone

4. In Utero in the Lab

5. Hatchling

6. Inklings

7. Leaving

8. Fall Back

9. Vertigo

10. Pivot

11. Diagnosis

12. Impulse Control

13. Baggage

14. Number Two

15. Regrouping

16. Fourth of July

17. Take Care

18. Mama in the Middle

19. Lost and Found

20. Days of the Dead 21. Writing Home