Living in the Long Shadow: Surviving a Legacy of Mental Illness

This poignant and compelling memoir, set in ’60s–’70s Los Angeles, traces a daughter’s experience of her mother’s schizophrenia and its lasting fallout before she ultimately reckons with her mother’s suicide and trusts in enduring love.

When Suzanne Sherman is four, her musically gifted mother is struck by sudden-onset schizophrenia, altering the course of Suzanne’s childhood.

Told in dual timelines—the years of her childhood and the two weeks following her mother’s suicide when Suzanne is eighteen—Living in the Long Shadow traces Suzanne’s coming of age in the shadow of mental illness as her family struggles with its far-reaching effects. As a teenager, Suzanne makes the difficult decision to move out of her mother’s house and go to live with her father and stepfamily—a challenging but ultimately positive choice. While her mother manages life on medication, Suzanne forms a friendship with her, sharing values, confidences, and a love of music and poetry. But just a year after leaving Los Angeles for college, excited for her future, she learns that, unable to live with the medication or without it, her mother has died by suicide.

Ten years later, an extraordinary sign comes from her mother—one that affirms the enduring presence of her love—and for Suzanne, grief, at last, begins to make room for acceptance.