THE BIPOLAR DEMENTIA ART CHRONICLES: How a Manic-Depressive Artist Survives Being the Primary Caregiver for Her Father & Ex-Mother-in-Law: A Memoir

In the summer of 2000, the author brought her 92-year-old father to Ithaca to live near her in an assisted-living facility, becoming his primary caregiver. A month later, she moved her 91-year-old ex-mother-in-law to the same facility. This book is the story of her struggles to manage their lives in assisted-living facilities, nursing homes and hospitals, while continuing to paint and deal with her own difficult mood swings.

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.
-Pamela Evans, Evans Editorial Services.

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.
-Gerard P. Lippert, MD, Psychiatrist, Tompkins County Mental Health Center

Lynne Taetzsch is an artist and writer. Her contemporary abstract paintings have been shown in solo and group exhibitions throughout the world, and she currently has a studio in Ithaca, New York. Lynne has published numerous short stories and essays in literary journals, and published books with Van Nostrand Reinhold, Regnery & Co., Watson-Guptill, and Faber & Faber Publishers.