Black humor alternates with almost unbearable pathos in National Public Radio journalist Jacki Lyden's memoir of her mother's manic-depressive episodes. Dreadful though those periodic bouts of madness were, they also gave an unhappy housewife a sense of power and freedom that Lyden couldn't help but admire. "You could say that the life of my imagination began with my mother's visions," she writes, making connections between her profession of "find[ing] things out in places of great secrets" and her struggle to deal with her mother's illness