Road to Bluebeard's Castle

MEMOIR - AUTOBIOGRAPHY - FAMILY - MAINE 

She was born into a world of grown ups, Lonely and afraid

As a child, her early impressions came from fairy tales. They became her world apart from the reality of life. This is the story of a journey…. of duality, Yin and Yang, good and evil. She wanted to shed light on the experiences of her life with the goal of enlightening others to the fact that they are not alone. One can escape, as she did, the imprisonment of their own mind. 

Because of isolation, fear, and abuse, she became so dependent on first her mother and then her husbands, that she could not imagine being able to take care of herself or her children without them. Her mind remained that of a child. 

That she could escape and heal, was a revelation that she needed to share and provide hope to others who feel entrapped. She wants to help them open the door. 

This tale begins near the end of the story, as a crisis unfolded that could have become fatal.
 

Jean Marie Ivey was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1938. She moved with her family to Hyde Park, New York in 1964, then Shepherds town, West Virginia for six short months, and finally moved to Maine in 1966 to live and raise her family in and near Acadia National Park. The Road to Bluebeard’s Castle is the story, ending in 1978, of the first forty years of her life. In the early eighties, she began a new life, beginning a thirty-three-year career at the Jackson laboratory in Bar Harbor, Maine. During that time, she also pursued a parttime career in photography, freelance writing, and illustrating, coauthoring the book Maine Paradise with Russell D. Butcher, published by Viking Press in 1972. In 1993 she cowrote and co-illustrated Facts and Fancy: Acadia National Park, Mount Desert Island and in 2018 Jean Marie along with her daughter Donna Marie Lee published a new and revised addition of “Facts and Fancy” that contains many fine points pertaining to the history and essence of Mount Desert Island in Acadia. Although she loves to write, paint, sing, and garden, her greatest love is her family: seven children, fourteen grandchildren, and three greatgrandsons. In 2016 she published her first novel “Cassie’s Dream” that grew out of that love. The novel is an enthralling voyage through time as explored through the dreams and visions of the main character, Cassandra Wright. Her next novel, “The Vine and the Cross” is a story of romance and mysticism. Jean Marie’s life has been full of music, art, mysticism, influence of ancestry, history, and a deep and abiding love of Maine.