SKY RANCH

A girl comes of age within the shadow of her mother’s schizophrenia in Lockwood’s debut memoir.

Schizophrenia was not a subject discussed in Lockwood’s house growing up, at least not by the name. “Every five years or so, my mother blamed all her troubles on my father, and day after day, I watched her verbally attack him,” she remembers. “One day, she was sent away to a strange hospital nowhere near where we lived, and even then, I had no one to help me understand what was wrong with my mother.” The author’s sense of isolation was exacerbated by the fact that home was a 650-acre ranch in Washington’s remote Chiliwist Valley. The family moved there from the Seattle suburbs in 1954, when the author was 8, so her father could raise sheep and grow wheat. In her memoir, Lockwood recounts not only her experiences growing up on Sky Ranch—learning to ride a horse, shepherding livestock—but her also lifelong quest to understand her enigmatic mother, Zelma, whose erratic behavior helped to define Lockwood’s childhood. Even after escaping the ranch, her early adult life was marred by Zelma’s suicide, an event that increased the author’s desire to understand her mother. Lockwood’s muscular prose captures the drama of rural life, both the human and the animal kind. Here she describes one of her chores: making sure none of the sheep get stuck in the swampier parts of the ranch. “I patrolled those places to make sure a sheep hadn’t gotten stuck in any of the soft, wet spots. As they sank to their bellies, their sharp hooves churned the watery earth with no purchase until they gave up the struggle. If I didn’t find them in time, they would die there.” Some of the most affecting writing comes from Zelma herself, whose poetry and journal entries are occasionally included. It’s stirring a portrait of ranch life in the 1950s and ’60s, but also a disturbing window into the mental healthcare of the same era.

A big-hearted memoir on the way a parent’s mental health can shape a child’s life.