Overview

OPTIMAL DISTANCE, A Divided Life, Part Two, begins with the author's decision to take a second chance on mid-life motherhood and ends with her preparations for death at age seventy-five. After being diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer, Joan Carol Lieberman writes with unusual self-awareness about her fear of death and her relationships with other mothers suffering from the same disease. An ambivalent agnostic, the author was deeply affected by a metaphysical experience with a bear and a sacrificial swan on the shores of Yellowstone Lake, as well as by increasing incidents of synchroneity and prescient dreams as she struggles to survive. When treatment side-effects cause kidney failure and put her on dialysis, she finds herself writing to Osama bin Laden about the similarities between Mormonism and his religious beliefs as a Sunni Muslim. This is an unusually complex autobiography- one that explores the most important questions we each face about our relationships, our spiritual beliefs, and our inevitable mortality. This luminous book will make readers wish Joan Carol Lieberman had another life to live and more stories to tell.

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9780998769028

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Reviews

In Part Two of OPTIMAL DISTANCE, A Divided Life, Joan Carol Lieberman takes readers on a journey to her anticipated imminent death, where dreams are signposts to her past and future. As she excavates the shards of her childhood, she finds both science and synchronicity. Her search for meaning leads her to the new science of epigenetics--producing hope for her progeny and ours. Ms. Lieberman's autobiography is a rarity among the plethora of memoirs written by those who have yet to even reach middle age. The narrative of her extraordinary life has an unlikely beginning, a meaningful middle, and a poignant end. She serves readers not just two chewy slices of American life, but a whole crusty loaf! -- Carol Houck Smith, W.W. Norton, (d. 2008)

In Part Two of OPTIMAL DISTANCE, A Divided Life, Joan Carol Lieberman takes readers on a journey to her anticipated imminent death, where dreams are signposts to her past and future. As she excavates the shards of her childhood, she finds both science and synchronicity. Her search for meaning leads her to the new science of epigenetics--producing hope for her progeny and ours. Ms. Lieberman's autobiography is a rarity among the plethora of memoirs written by those who have yet to even reach middle age. The narrative of her extraordinary life has an unlikely beginning, a meaningful middle, and a poignant end. She serves readers not just two chewy slices of American life, but a whole crusty loaf! -- Carol Houck Smith, W.W. Norton, (d. 2008)

Author Information

Joan Carol Lieberman has been a management consultant and speech writer for forty years working with lawyers, doctors, and women in professional leadership positions. At age seventy-five she continues to consult and write for long-time clients. Born a Gentile in Utah, she spent her childhood in two small Mormon towns, Delta and Logan. Her father was a federal research entomologist, distantly related to Simon Bamberger, Utah's only Jewish governor. Her mother, whose ancestors were among the first Mormon pioneers to arrive in the Valley of the Great Salt Lake, tragically developed paranoid schizophrenia shortly after the author's birth. Schizophrenia is a devastating and incurable biological mental illness that effects one out of every one hundred people. The title of OPTIMAL DISTANCE comes from the author's need to keep a safe distance away from her mother whose mental illness triggered episodic murderous impulses toward the author. The roots of Joan Carol Lieberman's unusual two-part autobiography can be found in a pink diary she received on her fifth birthday, a gift that converted her into a devout diarist. As an only and often lonely child, she found comfort in telling an imaginary listener her concerns and worries. Her father's research assignments meant she started high school in Bozeman, Montana and graduated in Bakersfield, California. After studies at the University of California in Berkeley, she traveled to Europe and worked as a medical volunteer in Africa. When the author returned to America, she committed her mother to a Tucson hospital where she was finally treated with the first anti-psychotic drug, Thorazine, after having made another attempt on the author's life. Soon after returning to Berkeley to finish her studies, the author became pregnant with her first child. Her life for the next five years mirrored the social upheaval of the 1960's. After two-years in Northern Idaho, where she went to finish her thesis, she accepted her first professional managerial position in Boulder, Colorado as director of the county-wide Head Start program. In 1971 the Ford Foundation sought her assistance in establishing the Native American Rights Fund (NARF) in Boulder. She met and fell in love with Bob Pelcyger, one of the founding NARF attorneys; following their marriage in 1975, he adopted her daughter. Her mother died on the morning of the author's fortieth birthday. The next year she and Bob had a son. The author was still nursing him when she was diagnosed with breast cancer. While facing death with a young child, she continued to work, started a school for her son, and provided hands-on-help to other mothers with breast cancer. Her now twenty-eight-year survival is both remarkable and inspiring. As a finalist for the Bakeless Literary Prize, she was invited to attend the 1999 Bread Loaf Writers' Conference as a Bakeless Scholar. It was there that she began to write her autobiography, an effort that continued on and off for the next eighteen years. After forty-two years of marriage, Joan Carol Lieberman and Bob Pelcyger made a bucket list for what they each wanted from the other before their death. Bob wanted his wife to finish both Part One and Part Two of OPTIMAL DISTANCE, A Divided Life, which she did in his honor on her seventy-fifth birthday.

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