Bipolar Dementia Art Chronicles: How a Manic-Depressive Artist Survives Being the Primary Caregiver for Her Father and EX-Mother-in-Law - a Memoir by Lynne Taetzsch

From the Publisher

This is the memoir of a bipolar artist who decides while in a hypomanic state to bring her 93-year-old father and 92-year-old ex-mother-in-law to live near her in an assisted living facility and become their primary caregiver. Overwhelmed soon after they arrive, she slides into a depression and struggles to maintain their lives and her own while continuing to paint. Told in a frank and quietly humorous style, the book portrays her struggles with doctors, nursing homes, dementia wards, family squabbles, drugs and other therapy. The reader will find insight and empathy in this "healing and compulsively readable" book.

What People Are Saying

Pamela Evans
"Lynne Taetzsch's issues of aging parents, sibling conflict, depression, bipolar disorder, sandwich generations, health care bureaucracies and facilities, the creative instinct, the meaning of life, and the possibility of happiness will touch a wide readership in our times. Told with quiet humor and insight, her memoir is both healing and compulsively readable."
—Evans Editorial Services

Gerard P. Lippert
"Lynne Taetzsch lovingly describes how her relationships with her elderly father and ex-mother-in-law gradually shift from adult child to caregiver as their health slowly declines. Her description of their personalities and behavior is never sentimental, and she portrays both their positive attributes and their quirks and foibles with a discerning eye. Along the way, she shows us how a typical family, sometimes dysfunctional, casts its members into particular roles. Interwoven with this theme, Ms. Taetzsch relates how her personal struggles affect her development as an artist, both for good and for bad. Lastly is Ms. Taetzsch's description of the effects of her bipolar disorder and its treatments on her life with her family and her ability to produce art. This book would be well worth reading simply as a journal of a woman's role as a caregiver in a somewhat eccentric extended family. However, what makes it remarkable is the interweaving of the other themes of artistic development and living with a serious mental disorder."
—MD, Psychiatrist, Tompkins County Mental Health Center

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