Synopsis

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.

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Praise

“With haunting clarity, Sherman holds the tension between sorrow and peace as she ultimately steps out of her mother’s long shadow, showing us how to reassemble our broken pieces into something whole.” —Samantha Rose, author of Giving Up the Ghost: A Daughter’s Memoir

“This beautifully written book captures the complexities of living with family mental illness, helping readers feel less alone on their journeys. Highly recommended!”—Stephanie Chandler, CEO of Nonfiction Authors Association

Excerpt

Chapter 1

My father never called my mother’s mental illness by name but he says it started the night they saw a hypnotist on stage on Pico. It was Los Angeles, the summer of 1964, and she was thirty. They had hired a babysitter to stay with their three kids—we were two, four, and six years old. “Our seat was way in the back,” he would tell me years later, indignant about the apparent illogic of it. My father was a lawyer. Logic could have been his middle name. Fifteen years after that night, my mother would decide she couldn’t walk in the house of horrors anymore. She had schizophrenia, a mental illness without a cure.

I had no sense of time at four years old, and my grasp of language didn’t help me make sense of what was happening around me. But I was watching.

One night my father came home from his office, suit coat draped over an arm. He closed the front door behind him, set his briefcase down, and took in the scene in the living room with a frown. My red plastic cash register sat on a card table beside a bunch of rubbery green grapes. Play dollar bills lay scattered on the carpet around it. The TV droned in an empty family room. Little David stood in his playpen wearing a full diaper and holding onto the railing with a joyful smile—Daddy’s home! Lynne was probably in our bedroom, door shut.

“Marilyn?” My father headed for their bedroom at the back of the house.

“What’s wrong with Mommy?” I asked, following.

He shooed me away with a hand. “She’s sick. Don’t come in.”

Why was Mommy still sick? I always got better after a few days when I was sick.

The next thing I knew my mother was leaving her bedroom for the kitchen, patting her bun into place and straightening her skirt on her way through the living room. She looked lopsided.

I stood in the kitchen doorway, watching her unwrap a slab of meat. She laid it on a broiler pan, then opened a can of lima beans and poured them into a pot. I loved lima beans! But I wasn’t about to say that right then.

For years I accepted a foggy truth about this time, letting perception act like fact, never tracking

the sequence of events in my early life or trying to understand the impressions that shaped me. It

wouldn’t be until forty years after my mother’s suicide that I would finally feel ready to examine the murky waters I had managed to survive without knowing how to swim. Doing it, I took a chance on either getting irrevocably lost in sorrow or finding a new peace.

To uncover how long my mother’s illness lasted this first time it came, I waded deep into the waters of my earliest memories. Verifiable dates gave shape to images I had never known where to place, letting me connect the dots.

About the Author

Suzanne Sherman is a memoir editor, coach, consultant, and author. Since 1996 she has taught memoir writing at colleges, online, and in workshops. She has also spoken at the California Writers Club, National Association of Memoir Writers, and Story Circle Network. Her other books are Lesbian and Gay Marriage: Private Commitments, Public Ceremonies (Temple University Press) and Girlhood in America: Personal Stories 1910–2010 (SZS Publishing). Suzanne lives in Northern California.

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