DON’T ASK, DON’T TELL

Jacki Lyden’s new book, Daughter of the Queen of Sheba, a memoir about growing up with a manic-depressive mother, confirms the point. As Lyden confesses, this is an expose, and behind every page you can nearly overhear the commercial wheels churning their contrived product. Sheba reads like merchandise concocted for its market value, not art wrung from the soul.

Unperturbed by the fact that her mother is living, Lyden displays every lurid shred of her family laundry, including transcripts of her mother’s diaries, personal letters, and psychological evaluations, wherein her mother’s exploits are described in humiliating detail. One report reads, “She was brought in handcuffed to our psychiatric unit . . . She insisted she did not belong here and attempted to escape. In the process of returning her to the unit, the record reveals she threw a chair and turned over a table. . . . Adverse behavior such as urinating on the floor is generally charted.” In a letter, Lyden’s mother writes to her daughters, “Kate, U. bastard,” and ” Jacki, you’re an asshole!” But since Lyden lends no guiding framework to her reportage, these ditties shock more than they inform. Her mother’s illness never anchors Lyden’s quest. It flits instead like a dancing bear meant to buck up the banalities of Lyden’s otherwise unremarkable past — a hook to hang a book on.

Lyden offers no insights. She trips on some, but she’s too busy tilting at metaphors to pick them up. When she says of her mother, “What transformed her beauty was her belief in it,” she might, for example, have launched a compelling account of how beauty dwells in the mind, and she might have shown, through the warped lens of mania, how some remake themselves by the sheer power of suggestion. Instead, she lapses into the platitudes to which she is prone: “God, how innocent that seems now . . .” When she hints that her mother’s voracious illness may have fed on the “unanswered longing” so prevalent in a suburban housewife’s world, she drops the theme, lumbering instead into a thicket of clauses.

Her prose is rife with such briars. We might have done without groaners like these: “[She] made me want to pop her one right in the kisser”; “she cries a river for all that she has lost. Oh, tough, tough love.” At times, though, Lyden shines, as when she writes, “In the hospital, layer upon layer of delusions were peeled back to reveal the designs of human vagary. To be only human caused fear, and doubt and mortality, and the dead weight of having run out of dreams.” She can craft a moving string, where sounds and meanings dance well — “Many times we stopped, pretending to pick milkweed pods or cattails or count geese on Ipesong, as we secretly cast hard glances up at the broad lawns of the sanitarium. We children had hunters’ eyes for our mother.” But mostly, her tangled shrubs are simply too dense to trudge through, and, without some organizing firmament, they aren’t worth the work.

She tells better the story of her stepfather’s violent abuse, the rage and damage it engendered, and of her admirable success in broadcast journalism, but these scenes lurk awkwardly between the bookends of her mother’s bouts. This meat of the book, in which her mother figures only peripherally, feels irrelevant, because Lyden never draws a convincing link between it and what surrounds it, or between her mother and herself. The result is an awkward pastiche of tenuously hitched people and events that seldom intersect, and whose effect on one another goes unremarked.

Manic-depression is heritable, and indeed, Lyden’s title implies that this is what she wants to address. But she is reluctant to mine the veins where her past would yield the most gold. The disjointed narrative fails because it jumps too often between strictly separate lives, and it reflects too well Lyden’s understandable need to eschew her mother’s genes. At times, she glimpses the legacy — in describing her own rash behavior as a foreign correspondent in war-torn Iraq, or her abuse of alcohol (to which she makes only oblique references), but she never turns to face it full-on. Moreover, Lyden has two sisters, and they, too, should have merited some thought. But in their roulette of inherited traits, Lyden won’t hazard guesses on who got the manic bullet, or who, by living it, was most harmed by their mother’s circus, and why.

These questions are the axis this book should turn on, but Lyden is unwilling to ask or to answer them, and that has made her story fiat and unbreachably solipsistic.

Norah Vincent is an associate editor at the Free Press and the author of The Instant Intellectual, to be published by Hyperion next spring.