Prechter Lecture keynote speaker Mimi Baird interviewed by Michigan Radio

“Hearing myself reading my father’s words, I am now just reacting to what I experienced when I was little. It’s just starting to come out," Baird said about processing her father's mental illness several decades after his death.

Prechter Lecture keynote speaker Mimi Baird, author of He Wanted the Moon, was interviewed by Michigan Radio for Stateside

Minding Michigan: In memoir, daughter searches for father's place in bipolar medical history.

Dr. Perry Baird was a Texas-born and Harvard-trained physician. In the '20s and '30s, his medical career was on the rise. And he became more and more interested in what caused "manic depression," as it was known at the time. Today, we know it as bipolar disorder.

In 1944, he was deep in the throes of the very disorder he was trying to understand and cure. And then he became separated from his family.

After being in and out of institutions, Dr. Baird died in 1959 of complications from a lobotomy.

Now, his daughter Mimi Baird has written a powerful book about her father's life, based on a manuscript of his that came to her many years after his death.