My Mother's Keeper: A Daughter's Memoir of Growing Up in the Shadow of Schizophrenia

Tara Holley's mother, Dawn Elgin, was singing with dance bands in Houston and New Orleans when she was 14 and 15, although no one knew she was that young, and by her early 20s had begun to make a name for herself in Hollywood. In 1951, she had Tara out of wedlock and her life fell apart. Within a few years, she was diagnosed as a schizophrenic and has spent much of her life since then either institutionalized or on the streets. Her daughter's evocative memoir falls into three parts. The first, the most artistically successful, tells an almost Dickensian tale of Tara being taken from her mother when she was four to be raised in Texas by her 75-year-old maiden great-aunt. By bits and pieces, largely through overhearing hushed family conversations, she begins to fit together her mother's story. The middle stretch of the book tells rather matter-of-factly the full details of what happened to Dawn and of Tara's difficult adolescence, which was fraught with physical and sexual abuse. The last third, during which the responsibility for Dawn's care falls fully on Tara-first as a music student in Austin, then as a wife and mother-is the most horrifying, in its details of the treatment and, more often, nontreatment of mental illness. Tara is heroic but pragmatic. Dawn's story is heartbreaking, but not romanticized. Tara's second husband, journalist Joe Holley, provides a prologue and an epilogue that gives a good deal of information on the care of schizophrenia today. Photos not seen by PW. (Apr.) FYI: An excerpt published in Texas Monthly won the 1992 PEN West Literary Award for magazine journalism.