by Jane Pauley

Although it covers the themes you'd expect from one of America's most popular broadcast journalists--the small-town upbringing, the first job at a local TV station, the momentous move to New York--the big event in Jane Pauley's autobiography is her struggle with bipolar disorder. SKYWRITING is a well-told, direct and honest depiction of one woman's attempts to come to terms with a little-understood and terrifying illness, the onset of which forces her to quit her job as a DATELINE presenter and lands her in a supervised medical facility: she's denied the use of sharp utensils, but, in recognition of her celebrity status, at least permitted to wear her best pajamas. Pauley is candid and revealing about the effects the disease has on her family--her husband, the cartoonist Garry Trudeau, is suitably alarmed to find the woman he married being replaced by an alternate personality--and her straightforward retelling of its bizarre symptoms, including impulsive shopping and a racing mind constantly devising increasingly grandiose schemes, only renders it more unsettling. That there's no fairy-tale happy ending here (although she's been able to resume her television career, Pauley remains medicated on Lithium), makes SKYWRITING's frank revelations all the more remarkable.