My Mother's Keeper: A Daughter's Memoir Of Growing Up In The Shadow Of Schizophrenia

My Mother's Keeper: A Daughter's Memoir Of Growing Up In The Shadow Of Schizophrenia by Holley, Tara E.. hardcover edition. ISBN: 9780688133689.

Dawn Elgin was destined to be a 1940s big-band star. From the time she was fourteen, she took her place at the microphone in Houstons elite Empire Room and sang with the voice of a jazz angel. Vibrant and glamorous, she boldly pursued her love of performing to New Orleans, Hollywood, and New York, where she gave birth to her daughter, Tara, when she was twenty-one. Then Dawn began to suffer persistent visions of a deathly specter at her bedside. She was diagnosed with acute paranoid schizophrenia and began a lifetime spent in and out of institutions. My Mothers Keeper is Taras deeply moving story of growing up in the shadow of her mothers tragic illness. As Dawns state worsened, Tara lived in the care of her imperious great-great-aunt Elsa - the familys elderly matriarch, who drew her into a rich world of old-fashioned treasures and Houston history - while her mother drifted in and out of Taras life like a fading fairy princess. Though Tara yearned for her mother during her childhood, Dawns condition was usually kept from her, the subject of secretive family discussion and neighborhood gossip. By the time Tara was seventeen she had become Dawns guardian, bent on rescuing the shambling street person her mother had become and transforming her back into the beautiful, lively woman she remembered. Above all, it is a deeply moving exploration of the mother-daughter bond - of how Tara learned to balance her mothers needs with her own, and how she finally came to terms with Dawns legacy when she became a mother herself. Emotionally compelling and powerfully rendered, My Mothers Keeper offers indelible proof of loves power to transcend a devastating illness.