Daughter of the Queen of Sheba: A Memoir Book

November 1997

As an award-winning foreign correspondent for National Public Radio, Jacki Lyden has spent her adult life on the front lines in some of the world's most dangerous hot spots and war zones, from Baghdad at the height of the Gulf War to Belfast.

Her childhood was a war zone of a different kind. In 1966, when Lyden was only 12, her mother suffered a nervous breakdown. It was the start of her mother's 20-year struggle with what we now call manic depression. But in a less enlightened era, in small-town Wisconsin, she was simply called crazy. In her delusions, she was a woman with power: the president and CEO of a major corporation, Marie Antoinette, the Queen of Sheba. In real life she was nearly powerless -- married to a local doctor who drugged her to control her moods and terrorized her children to keep them quiet.

In Daughter of the Queen of Sheba, Lyden chronicles the brilliant facts and fables that went along with her mother's illness and the impact it had on her life and the lives of her sister. A witness to her mother's madness -- and forever haunted by its cause and by the visions her mother sees -- Lyden ultimately understands and respects the powerful figure her mother became when sick. "Her sense of power was in such stark contrast to her sense of disempowerment as a pretty housewife that it fascinated my sisters and me," Lyden writes. "In her manic life, she got revenge for all the disappointments in her worldly life. If she felt wronged, she could literally take her destiny into her own hands, and she did...she could be as free and unfettered by cares as possible."

A deeply moving testimony to devotion and love in the face of a bewildering illness, Daughter of the Queen of Sheba also chronicles the parallels between the inner life of Lyden's mother and Lyden's own wanderlust. In her 20s, Lyden joined a traveling rodeo. Later, as a foreign correspondent, Lyden's reports from faraway cities -- Baghdad, Beirut, Jerusalem, Amman, Tel Aviv, Tehran -- strangely echoed her mother's journeys of the mind. "It is a story," says Lyden, "that looks at how we become our fantasies, and how powerful fantasy is as a force to hold on to when there is not much else to believe in."