Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Optimal Distance
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 6/16/1942
WEBSITE: http://www.optimaldistance.com/
CITY: Boulder
STATE: CO
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY: American
Agent: Meg Cassidy mcassidy9@gmail.com (262) 327-2668
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born June 16, 1942 in UT; married Bob Pelcyger, 1975; children: Olivia and Eben.
EDUCATION:Attended University of California.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer. Worked formerly as a medical volunteer in Africa, as director of the county-wide Head Start program, as Ford Foundation Native American Rights Fund developer, and as a management consultant for lawyers, doctors, and women in leadership positions.
AWARDS:Bakeless Literary Prize finalist, 1999.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Joan Carol Lieberman is a writer and former consultant. Born in Utah in 1942, Lieberman was raised by her father, a scientist, and her mother, a former Mormon. Soon after Lieberman’s birth, her mother developed paranoid schizophrenia. Lieberman spent much of her childhood at the Mormon Church to avoid her mother, who was prone to unpredictable and violent outbursts.
When Lieberman was fourteen, her family moved to Bozeman, Montana, where her father was transferred for work. A year following, he was sent to Bakersfield, California, where Lieberman finished high school. After high school graduation Lieberman attended college at the University of California. Following college graduation, she traveled around Europe and worked as a medical volunteer in Africa.
Lieberman returned to California after her travels and gave birth to a daughter. In 1966 she moved to northern Idaho to finish her thesis. Two years following the move, she was offered the director position for the county-wide Head Start program, which brought her to Boulder, Colorado. In 1971 she began working with the Ford Foundation to help develop the Native American Rights Fund. While working for the Ford Foundation, she met her future husband, Bob Pelcyger. The two married in 1975. Over the next four decades, Lieberman worked as a management consultant for lawyers, doctors, and women in leadership positions. Lieberman and her husband live in Boulder.
Lieberman’s Optimal Distance: A Divided Life, is both family history and autobiography split into two sections. The work took Lieberman eighteen years to complete, and included extensive research. Interspersed throughout the narrative are photographs that Lieberman tracked down from her family’s history.
The title of the book is an allusion to a family secret that plagued her family for many generations: her mother Margaret’s long struggle with paranoid schizophrenia. Lieberman opens the book by acknowledging this struggle and discussing how her childhood was affected by her mother’s erratic behavior. While Lieberman’s father was an atheist, her mother heard the voices of both angels and devils.
Lieberman then moves the narrative of the story to the histories of her parents. She writes about her mother’s family’s devotion to the Church of Latter Day Saints, while her father’s family practiced Judaism. The two met on a blind date, and although a relationship between a Mormon and a Jew was considered questionable at the time, they married. Lieberman explains that Margaret’s schizophrenic symptoms began around the time of the birth of Lieberman and her twin brother, who died soon after he was born.
As Lieberman grew older, her mother’s symptoms worsened. The young girl found solace in her neighbor Marlene Evans, the Mormon Church, and the home of her Aunt Mary. As a young adult, Lieberman lived in Europe, an experience that helped her grow into an independent adult. Returning home, Lieberman was able to move past the trauma of her childhood, pursuing a successful career and raising a child of her own.
A contributor to Kirkus Reviews wrote: “Her poignant, painstakingly detailed journey is both exhaustive and intimately personal. A searingly honest chronicle of motherhood and mental illness drawn from the bittersweet memories of a daughter.”
Optimal Distance: A Divided Life, Part Two opens just after Lieberman’s mother’s death. The event was both devastating to Lieberman and freeing: she now felt she could start a life of her own without any attachments to her traumatic childhood. In Part Two, Lieberman’s grown daughter has left for college, prompting her to consider having another child. She and her husband decide to attempt a pregnancy, and Lieberman successfully gives birth to a son. The next major event of Lieberman’s life is her breast cancer diagnosis. Fortunately, she successfully fights the cancer and soon thereafter opens a preschool.
Later, Lieberman and her husband move to Florida to care for Lieberman’s mother-in-law. The move prompts Lieberman to learn, humorously, the many different meanings of ‘family.’ A contributor to Kirkus Reviews described the book as “a memorable, rewarding family saga of familial love and unbridled determination.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, Aug. 15, 2017, review of Optimal Distance: A Divided Life, Part One; September 15, 2017, review of Optimal Distance: A Divided Life, Part Two.
About the Author
In many ways, the roots of OPTIMAL DISTANCE, A Divided Life, extend back to June 17, 1947, the day after my fifth birthday. As I lay on my stomach on a surplus Army blanket in Logan, Utah, I used a crayon to illustrate my feelings in a pink diary with a praying child printed on the cover. Unable to spell more than a few words, I tried to draw how I felt. The diary had arrived in the mail, a birthday present sent by my Aunt Mary from Salt Lake City. It had a pseudo lock and key, but I soon lost the tiny aluminum key and had to break the lock. When the pink diary had no more empty pages, I began using a school notebook, a habit that persisted for the next seven decades. Writing has always kept me alive.
I was born in Utah in 1942. My father was a scientist and atheist, distantly related to Simon Bamberger, the first and only Jewish governor of Utah. My mother, a descendant of prominent Mormon pioneers, lost her familial faith during the Depression. Tragically, she developed paranoid schizophrenia shortly after my birth and, from then until her death, her mind was under the control of invisible demons. As an only child in Logan, Utah, I took refuge in the interstices of the Mormon Church trying to keep a safe distance from my mother’s unpredictable and murderous impulses because I knew she would never follow me there. I often felt like a small wild animal desperately hiding from danger among a large herd of domineering dairy cows.
I was fourteen when I left Utah and Mormonism behind after my father was transferred to Bozeman, Montana. A year later he was sent to Bakersfield, California where I finished high school. Following studies at the University of California, I traveled in Europe and worked as a medical volunteer in Africa. When I returned to Berkeley, I gave birth to my daughter, pushing her stroller through demonstrations for Free Speech and against the War in Vietnam. In 1966, I left Berkeley to finish my thesis on leadership in a rent-free house in Northern Idaho. Two years later, a job offer to become the director of the county-wide Head Start program brought me to Boulder, Colorado, where I still reside. In 1971, I undertook an assignment for the Ford Foundation to help develop the Native American Rights Fund, where I met and fell in love with Bob Pelcyger . We were married in 1975, and for the next four decades, I worked as a management consultant serving clients who were lawyers, doctors, and women in leadership positions.
In 1999, as a finalist for the Bakeless Literary Prize, I was invited to attend the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. My publishing consult was with Carol Houck Smith of W.W. Norton, who encouraged me to expand my workshop submission into an autobiography. Then fifty-seven, I had been “living” with metastatic cancer for a decade, and didn’t believe I had enough time left on my life clock to undertake such an effort. Nonetheless, buttressed by Carol Houck Smith’s endorsement, I began searching through my diary entries for clues and areas of research. Progress slowed after I suffered a near fatal stroke while flying to Utah in 2007. Sadly, Carol Houck Smith died the day after Thanksgiving in 2008, while improbably, I lived on.
After forty-two years of marriage, Bob and I made a bucket list for what each of us wanted from the other before our approaching deaths. The only item on Bob’s list was the completion of OPTIMAL DISTANCE , A Divided Life, Part One and Part Two. Now seventy-five and dependent on a life-sustaining cocktail of medications, I have finally fulfilled my beloved husband’s request. Credit should go to Bob for his endless persistence and to Aunt Mary for the gift of a pink diary.
Author’s photograph by Stephen Collector, Boulder, Colorado, June 2017
Lieberman, Joan Carol: OPTIMAL
DISTANCE
Kirkus Reviews.
(Sept. 15, 2017):
COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Lieberman, Joan Carol OPTIMAL DISTANCE Camperdown Elm Publishing (Indie Nonfiction) 9, 1
Lieberman's (Optimal Distance: A Divided Life, Part One, 2017) autobiography continues with this second
installment, which resumes her story just after her schizophrenic mother's passing. Near the start of this
book, the author eloquently equates her mother's death to "an amputation that left behind a phantom limb
still sending alarm signals to my brain." The event also gave the author a new perspective on her own fate
and "definitely made me eager to start my life over." With remarkable recollection, she retraces her own life
after her mother became a memory, unhurriedly recounting decades of devoted child-rearing and pet raising
and the joys and struggles of her career and family life. When her own daughter moved away to college, she
reconsidered the surgery that prevented her from having further pregnancies, despite her husband's initial
objections. She reversed the procedure and had a son, Eben, in 1983, 20 years after the birth of her first
child, Olivia. A struggle against breast cancer clouded her mid-40s, but she managed to start a preschool
and experienced great improvement after treatment with an experimental drug. She endured an unforeseen
remission in 1992, which reframed her life once more. Later, she went on to care for her mother-in-law in
Florida. The daily foibles and adventures of the author and her mother-in-law in these later pages add some
welcome levity and humor to this impassioned autobiography and demonstrate the author's talent for zesty
prose before the predication of her own declining health takes over the book's concluding chapters. Still, as
readers may expect after the last volume, Lieberman effectively shows how her abiding spirit delivers her
from death's door again and again. Although the sunny skies in this remembrance often seem to be few and
far between, readers will still get immense satisfaction from knowing that Lieberman made it through--and
that she has happiness, love, and precious children to show for it. As in her first installment, the author
generously supplies family photographs that greatly embellish and enhance her moving chronicle of
motherhood. A memorable, rewarding family saga of familial love and unbridled determination.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Lieberman, Joan Carol: OPTIMAL DISTANCE." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Sept. 2017. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A504217483/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=22b89810.
Accessed 23 Apr. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A504217483
4/23/2018 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1524513616046 2/2
Lieberman, Joan Carol: OPTIMAL
DISTANCE
Kirkus Reviews.
(Aug. 15, 2017):
COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Lieberman, Joan Carol OPTIMAL DISTANCE Camperdown Elm Publishing (Indie Nonfiction) $20.00 7,
28 ISBN: 978-0-9987690-1-1
A debut coming-of-age autobiography chronicles personal ancestry and familial struggle. In the first of
author and speechwriter Lieberman's two-part history--a massively researched endeavor 18 years in the
making--she unveils the genesis of her family life through heartfelt prose and generous photographs. The
book's title is derived from the autonomy the author strived to achieve in order to feel wholly at peace with
what she calls a shameful family secret: her mother Margaret's lifelong struggle with paranoid
schizophrenia. Life became challenging early on as the daughter of an atheist father and a mother who heard
the "voices of a god and a devil." Lieberman diligently retraces her parents' individual histories, reaching
back to her mother's birth to a Mormon family in Utah and the blind date that would seal her romantic fate
with the author's father, Frank. Though the marriage of a Mormon-raised daughter to a gentile raised
eyebrows in Salt Lake City, their union produced the author, the surviving female twin from a complicated
pregnancy (her brother died in childbirth). Years later, her mother began hearing demonic voices that
incapacitated her, while Lieberman found supreme solace in the safe havens of next-door neighbor Marlene
Evans, the Mormon Church, and her Aunt Mary's home. In sharing cherished anecdotes and resonant
memories, the author effectively exorcises the demons of a youth spent searching for answers and knowing
"my mother was both dangerous and deeply disturbed." As the author learned lessons about death, money,
driving, and jealousy, a stint abroad helped her mature into a woman capable of love and motherhood even
as the Vietnam War raged on and the irrational fear that she would develop schizophrenia loomed.
Lieberman rightfully labels schizophrenia as an incurable "human disaster." As a child, her mother's
paranoid hallucinations of "invisible demons" were random and frightening, and Lieberman's portrayal of
Margaret's further descent is palpably disturbing and sorrowful. Yet it also presents the author as an
increasingly formidable and resilient woman able to withstand the sadness of her mother's illness with the
fortitude of a well-adjusted adult. Her poignant, painstakingly detailed journey is both exhaustive and
intimately personal. A searingly honest chronicle of motherhood and mental illness drawn from the
bittersweet memories of a daughter.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Lieberman, Joan Carol: OPTIMAL DISTANCE." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Aug. 2017. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A500364769/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=e2f96fdf.
Accessed 23 Apr. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A500364769