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Living in the Long Shadow: Surviving a Legacy of Mental Illness
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Expected 29 Sep 26A memoir dedicated to destigmatizing severe mental illness and honoring the quiet, courageous choices of child survivors.
When Suzanne Sherman is four years old, her musically gifted mother is struck by sudden-onset schizophrenia—and nothing in her family will ever be the same.
Set in '60s–'70s Los Angeles, Living in the Long Shadow is a poignant memoir told in dual timelines: the formative years of Suzanne's childhood and the two weeks following her mother's suicide when Suzanne is eighteen.
With honesty and grace, Suzanne traces what it means to grow up in the shadow of mental illness—navigating her need for guidance and belonging, the fear of inheriting her mother's illness, and the journey of loving a mother unable to live with or without her medication.
This is not only a story of grief.
It is a story of resilience: the difficult choices that lead toward healing, the friendships and family bonds that sustain us, and the way love can reach us even after death. Ten years after her mother's passing, an extraordinary sign affirms that love's enduring presence—and Suzanne's grief begins, at last, to make room for acceptance.
When Suzanne Sherman is four years old, her musically gifted mother is struck by sudden-onset schizophrenia—and nothing in her family will ever be the same.
Set in '60s–'70s Los Angeles, Living in the Long Shadow is a poignant memoir told in dual timelines: the formative years of Suzanne's childhood and the two weeks following her mother's suicide when Suzanne is eighteen.
With honesty and grace, Suzanne traces what it means to grow up in the shadow of mental illness—navigating her need for guidance and belonging, the fear of inheriting her mother's illness, and the journey of loving a mother unable to live with or without her medication.
This is not only a story of grief.
It is a story of resilience: the difficult choices that lead toward healing, the friendships and family bonds that sustain us, and the way love can reach us even after death. Ten years after her mother's passing, an extraordinary sign affirms that love's enduring presence—and Suzanne's grief begins, at last, to make room for acceptance.
- GenresMemoir
308 pages, Kindle Edition
Expected publication September 29, 2026
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August 2, 2026Suzanne Sherman’s memoir is the product of Sherman’s courageous choice to return to the chaotic years of her mother’s mental illness and decline, and Sherman’s own shattered childhood. To live, to survive the wreckage of that childhood and that horrifying loss is haunting enough, but to return to those years and methodically recapture them, year by year, hope by hope, pain by pain takes a formidable strength of character.
Sherman is four years old in 1964 at the onset of her mother’s incurable paranoid schizophrenia, and is eighteen when her mother kills herself in 1978. Forty years later, Sherman retrieves photos, diaries, memorabilia, memories from those years in an attempt to “track the sequence of events in my early life …”to understand the impressions that shaped me.” The memoir retraces these years in chronological order, interspersed with segments in italics throughout the book that center on the two weeks following her mother’s suicide and burial.
Marilyn, the writer’s mom, is a Wellesley graduate in English literature, an artist, musician, poet, naturalist and activist, and seamlessly shares these loves with her three children, as well as an awareness of the world’s turbulent times. As a mother, she desperately longs to be capable of nurturing her three children, of giving them a mother’s unchanging love.
She writes songs, makes play-doh and helps her children sculpt with it. She bakes and decorates birthday cakes for them, and brings sand home from their beach walks to make into sand candles. She calls the children to write on the bare floor when carpeting is being replaced, joyfully joining them in breaking the rules about writing on floors and walls. She puts Sherman’s poem about air pollution to music and sews her dresses with one sleeve when Sherman breaks an arm. She reads poetry to them
as they lie down to nap. Marilyn is an attentive and active mother, until the disease ambushes her.
The unpredictability her mother’s disease brings, requires that Sherman learn at too young of an age, to read the subtle signs of disturbance in her mother’s face and acts. Through the years she gauges that disturbance in her mother’s wide, frightened eyes, or the smudged eyeliner and lipstick from a mother whose make-up routine is always “impeccable.” There are the days when the
drapes are drawn and she finds her mother sitting in the darkened room with a vacant stare, days when her mother screams at the children to not answer the ringing phone because “they” know where we are, “they” are watching from the garden with their telescopes. And there are days when mom leaves to enter the hospital or is carried away on a stretcher after ingesting pills.
Marilyn is eventually finally prescribed Thorazine, an anti-psychotic drug that is “like a medical lobotomy,” Sherman writes. While the medical community saw sedation as improvement, she says, she watches her mother suffer changes that will eventually lead to her suicide. Sherman writes that in looking back, had she been older she would have questioned the doctor: had he told her mom she’d be a walking zombie? “I might have asked if he’d told her she would never read a book or play another Beethoven sonata again. That her concentration would be gone; that she would never be able to hold a job.”
Marilyn loses vitality and joy. Home becomes a disorderly, unkempt and lonely place. The three children barricade themselves in their rooms, into their separate solitudes and see one another at six o’clock dinner, a sad ritual that Marilyn keeps, as if it is the one control she can maintain.
The siblings grow silent and separate, hugging one another only in grief, or despair. Their childhoods are muted, joys and sorrows unspoken, their lives lived under duress. Nothing is dependable when the mother who adores you is the woman who could abandon you for death. No one close to her will escape suffering.
Sherman escapes the turmoil of home, at different ages, with alcohol, marijuana, shoplifting, truancy from school, “edgy, ragtag, angry and hard drinking boys”, sexual explorations, a brief homelessness, weight problems, the entire range of escapism. All of these before the age of eighteen. And what we see in every instance is a moment in time when Sherman, with uncommon resolve, says “no more.”
With cigarettes, drugs, school, relationships, her weight, even leaving her mother’s house, Sherman changes her mind in order to change her life. It is a toughness heartbreakingly earned. “Nothing could be counted on, home or anywhere,” she decided, and so decided to save herself, over and over. Over and over she, even as a very young child, calculates danger and escapes with a heartbreaking reflex born of relentless trauma and apprehension.
While the memoir traces fifteen turbulent years of life in the long shadow of her mother’s illness, the most heart wrenching descriptions are those of her mother’s descent into the terror that stalks her, and the profound dissolution of her mother’s identity.
In her quest to make sense of her memories, Sherman recovers the remembrance of a gifted and beautiful mother who cherished her children and life, who cared about the world and the people around her. Sherman remembers a vibrant woman deprived of the will to survive if survival required a passionless and hollow life.
In her epilogue, Sherman expresses “my profound gratitude for my mother….I felt an almost palpable connection with her every time I wrote of her and felt her absence again when I finished the book. I am grateful for our time together in these pages….”
It is a memoir as difficult to read as it is to forget, but for those who have suffered in the long shadow of mental illness, or those who did not survive it, stories like this offer empathy and recognition.. For those fortunate enough to have skirted those shadows, it offers insight and compassion.
Sherman is four years old in 1964 at the onset of her mother’s incurable paranoid schizophrenia, and is eighteen when her mother kills herself in 1978. Forty years later, Sherman retrieves photos, diaries, memorabilia, memories from those years in an attempt to “track the sequence of events in my early life …”to understand the impressions that shaped me.” The memoir retraces these years in chronological order, interspersed with segments in italics throughout the book that center on the two weeks following her mother’s suicide and burial.
Marilyn, the writer’s mom, is a Wellesley graduate in English literature, an artist, musician, poet, naturalist and activist, and seamlessly shares these loves with her three children, as well as an awareness of the world’s turbulent times. As a mother, she desperately longs to be capable of nurturing her three children, of giving them a mother’s unchanging love.
She writes songs, makes play-doh and helps her children sculpt with it. She bakes and decorates birthday cakes for them, and brings sand home from their beach walks to make into sand candles. She calls the children to write on the bare floor when carpeting is being replaced, joyfully joining them in breaking the rules about writing on floors and walls. She puts Sherman’s poem about air pollution to music and sews her dresses with one sleeve when Sherman breaks an arm. She reads poetry to them
as they lie down to nap. Marilyn is an attentive and active mother, until the disease ambushes her.
The unpredictability her mother’s disease brings, requires that Sherman learn at too young of an age, to read the subtle signs of disturbance in her mother’s face and acts. Through the years she gauges that disturbance in her mother’s wide, frightened eyes, or the smudged eyeliner and lipstick from a mother whose make-up routine is always “impeccable.” There are the days when the
drapes are drawn and she finds her mother sitting in the darkened room with a vacant stare, days when her mother screams at the children to not answer the ringing phone because “they” know where we are, “they” are watching from the garden with their telescopes. And there are days when mom leaves to enter the hospital or is carried away on a stretcher after ingesting pills.
Marilyn is eventually finally prescribed Thorazine, an anti-psychotic drug that is “like a medical lobotomy,” Sherman writes. While the medical community saw sedation as improvement, she says, she watches her mother suffer changes that will eventually lead to her suicide. Sherman writes that in looking back, had she been older she would have questioned the doctor: had he told her mom she’d be a walking zombie? “I might have asked if he’d told her she would never read a book or play another Beethoven sonata again. That her concentration would be gone; that she would never be able to hold a job.”
Marilyn loses vitality and joy. Home becomes a disorderly, unkempt and lonely place. The three children barricade themselves in their rooms, into their separate solitudes and see one another at six o’clock dinner, a sad ritual that Marilyn keeps, as if it is the one control she can maintain.
The siblings grow silent and separate, hugging one another only in grief, or despair. Their childhoods are muted, joys and sorrows unspoken, their lives lived under duress. Nothing is dependable when the mother who adores you is the woman who could abandon you for death. No one close to her will escape suffering.
Sherman escapes the turmoil of home, at different ages, with alcohol, marijuana, shoplifting, truancy from school, “edgy, ragtag, angry and hard drinking boys”, sexual explorations, a brief homelessness, weight problems, the entire range of escapism. All of these before the age of eighteen. And what we see in every instance is a moment in time when Sherman, with uncommon resolve, says “no more.”
With cigarettes, drugs, school, relationships, her weight, even leaving her mother’s house, Sherman changes her mind in order to change her life. It is a toughness heartbreakingly earned. “Nothing could be counted on, home or anywhere,” she decided, and so decided to save herself, over and over. Over and over she, even as a very young child, calculates danger and escapes with a heartbreaking reflex born of relentless trauma and apprehension.
While the memoir traces fifteen turbulent years of life in the long shadow of her mother’s illness, the most heart wrenching descriptions are those of her mother’s descent into the terror that stalks her, and the profound dissolution of her mother’s identity.
In her quest to make sense of her memories, Sherman recovers the remembrance of a gifted and beautiful mother who cherished her children and life, who cared about the world and the people around her. Sherman remembers a vibrant woman deprived of the will to survive if survival required a passionless and hollow life.
In her epilogue, Sherman expresses “my profound gratitude for my mother….I felt an almost palpable connection with her every time I wrote of her and felt her absence again when I finished the book. I am grateful for our time together in these pages….”
It is a memoir as difficult to read as it is to forget, but for those who have suffered in the long shadow of mental illness, or those who did not survive it, stories like this offer empathy and recognition.. For those fortunate enough to have skirted those shadows, it offers insight and compassion.
Review of advance copy received from Author
In Living in the Long Shadow, author Suzanne Sherman revisits her childhood as the daughter of Marilyn, a gifted, loving, musically alive woman whose schizophrenia slowly reshapes the family’s world, and then follows the aftermath of Marilyn’s suicide into Sherman’s adulthood. The memoir moves through West Los Angeles childhood scenes, divorce, sibling fracture, hospitals, medication, silence, and grief, but it’s never only a book about damage. It’s also about memory doing its careful work: a child in Sequoia learning to “listen” to the forest with her mother, a birthday cake left suspended in terror, a candlelight peace march led by Marilyn’s guitar and trembling hope, and, years later, roses drifting on the San Francisco Bay like an impossible answer.
I was taken by the book’s refusal to flatten Marilyn into her illness. Sherman writes about her mother’s frightening absences with clarity, but she also restores the radiance that illness couldn’t fully erase. I believed in Marilyn as the woman who made one-sleeved dresses for a daughter in a cast, who turned an environmental poem into a song, who planted lemon trees and noticed birds hatching under the trellis. That tenderness makes the pain sharper. The memoir understands that love and fear can live in the same room, sometimes in the same breath, and Sherman has a rare gift for letting those contradictions remain unsettled.
The writing is intimate, precise, and quietly devastating. Sherman’s structure, moving between childhood recollection and the approaching knowledge of her mother’s death, gives the book a haunted pulse. I found that approach emotionally true, because grief rarely arrives in a straight line. Some passages feel almost unbearably vivid, especially the small domestic humiliations and terrors: the father who insists on logic, the child learning to manage adults’ moods, the sister’s volatility, the stepmother’s cool judgments around food. The ideas beneath the story are equally strong. The book asks what children inherit when a family cannot name what’s happening, and what it costs when mental illness is met with denial, shame, or inadequate care. The density of pain is heavy, but I didn’t find it excessive. It felt earned, the way an old house creaks because every beam remembers.
I finished this memoir moved by its sorrow, but also by its steadiness. Living in the Long Shadow is not a simple recovery story, and that’s part of its grace. It’s a book about surviving what can’t be repaired, then finding language tender enough to hold it. I’d recommend it to readers of reflective memoirs, especially those interested in family trauma, mental illness, suicide loss, complicated mother-daughter love, and the long work of making peace with the past.
I was taken by the book’s refusal to flatten Marilyn into her illness. Sherman writes about her mother’s frightening absences with clarity, but she also restores the radiance that illness couldn’t fully erase. I believed in Marilyn as the woman who made one-sleeved dresses for a daughter in a cast, who turned an environmental poem into a song, who planted lemon trees and noticed birds hatching under the trellis. That tenderness makes the pain sharper. The memoir understands that love and fear can live in the same room, sometimes in the same breath, and Sherman has a rare gift for letting those contradictions remain unsettled.
The writing is intimate, precise, and quietly devastating. Sherman’s structure, moving between childhood recollection and the approaching knowledge of her mother’s death, gives the book a haunted pulse. I found that approach emotionally true, because grief rarely arrives in a straight line. Some passages feel almost unbearably vivid, especially the small domestic humiliations and terrors: the father who insists on logic, the child learning to manage adults’ moods, the sister’s volatility, the stepmother’s cool judgments around food. The ideas beneath the story are equally strong. The book asks what children inherit when a family cannot name what’s happening, and what it costs when mental illness is met with denial, shame, or inadequate care. The density of pain is heavy, but I didn’t find it excessive. It felt earned, the way an old house creaks because every beam remembers.
I finished this memoir moved by its sorrow, but also by its steadiness. Living in the Long Shadow is not a simple recovery story, and that’s part of its grace. It’s a book about surviving what can’t be repaired, then finding language tender enough to hold it. I’d recommend it to readers of reflective memoirs, especially those interested in family trauma, mental illness, suicide loss, complicated mother-daughter love, and the long work of making peace with the past.
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
First of all, thank you to NetGalley for the opportunity to read this book before its publication. It’s one I’m genuinely grateful I didn’t miss.
Living in the Long Shadow was incredibly powerful. There were so many moments that gave me chills because of how honestly and vulnerably Suzanne Sherman shares her experiences. The emotions throughout this book felt so raw and real that I found myself stopping just to process what I’d read.
What I appreciated most was that this isn’t just a story about mental illness—it’s about the ripple effects it has on families, relationships, identity, and healing. It was heartbreaking at times, but it was also deeply insightful and compassionate.
As someone who has become increasingly interested in understanding mental health and trauma, this book really resonated with me. It made me reflect on how experiences shape us and how the impact of mental illness often extends far beyond the individual living with it.
This is the kind of book that stays with you long after you’ve finished it. It gave me a lot to think about, and I found myself reflecting on it even after I turned the last page.
I would absolutely recommend this to anyone interested in mental health, family dynamics, trauma, or simply reading an honest and beautifully written memoir. It’s an emotional read, but a truly worthwhile one.
Living in the Long Shadow was incredibly powerful. There were so many moments that gave me chills because of how honestly and vulnerably Suzanne Sherman shares her experiences. The emotions throughout this book felt so raw and real that I found myself stopping just to process what I’d read.
What I appreciated most was that this isn’t just a story about mental illness—it’s about the ripple effects it has on families, relationships, identity, and healing. It was heartbreaking at times, but it was also deeply insightful and compassionate.
As someone who has become increasingly interested in understanding mental health and trauma, this book really resonated with me. It made me reflect on how experiences shape us and how the impact of mental illness often extends far beyond the individual living with it.
This is the kind of book that stays with you long after you’ve finished it. It gave me a lot to think about, and I found myself reflecting on it even after I turned the last page.
I would absolutely recommend this to anyone interested in mental health, family dynamics, trauma, or simply reading an honest and beautifully written memoir. It’s an emotional read, but a truly worthwhile one.
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
Living in the Long Shadow is an honest and deeply personal memoir about growing up with a mother whose sudden-onset schizophrenia changed the course of an entire family. Told through dual timelines, Suzanne Sherman reflects on her childhood in 1960s and 1970s Los Angeles while also revisiting the weeks following her mother's suicide. The structure works well, gradually revealing how mental illness shaped her family, her identity, and her understanding of grief.
Sherman brings a lot of compassion to a painful story. She doesn't reduce her mother to a diagnosis or offer easy answers. Instead, she writes about love, fear, resilience, and the complicated bonds that can exist even in the midst of profound mental illness. This is a thoughtful memoir that will resonate with readers interested in family relationships, mental health, and stories of healing after loss. My sincere thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for providing me with a free advance review copy.
Sherman brings a lot of compassion to a painful story. She doesn't reduce her mother to a diagnosis or offer easy answers. Instead, she writes about love, fear, resilience, and the complicated bonds that can exist even in the midst of profound mental illness. This is a thoughtful memoir that will resonate with readers interested in family relationships, mental health, and stories of healing after loss. My sincere thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for providing me with a free advance review copy.
Review of advance copy received from Author
Suzanne Sherman’s compelling memoir, Living in the Long Shadow: Surviving a Legacy of Mental Illness, delivered me inside the author’s world of living with her schizophrenic mother-- a woman who ended her own life to stop the suffering. The author shares not only her mother’s illness--which started when she was 30, and the author was 4—but also her mother’s humanity, the person behind and beyond the illness. Sherman’s exceptional ability to craft scenes with words allowed me to do more than understand her experience—I felt it. There were moments that literally made me gasp out loud, and others that brought me to tears.
This is a powerful, deeply moving, and unforgettable page-turner. I highly recommend it to anyone who has been affected by mental illness, or to anyone interested in understanding the devastating toll it can take—not only on the person suffering, but on everyone within their circle.
This is a powerful, deeply moving, and unforgettable page-turner. I highly recommend it to anyone who has been affected by mental illness, or to anyone interested in understanding the devastating toll it can take—not only on the person suffering, but on everyone within their circle.
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September 16, 2026As a daughter of a mother who suffered from the ravages of mental illness and survived a suicide attempt, I was riveted by Suzanne Sherman’s memoir, "Living in the Shadow." I was compelled by her vivid and poignant descriptions of her mother, with her zest for life, her creativity, her deep love for her children, and ultimately her inability to keep battling the progression of her schizophrenia, and the drugs that flattened her spirit . As well, the author takes us on an intimate journey through her experiences as a child and young adult, and the ways she found solace and creativity, as her mother became less and less available to her. As someone whose mother struggled to stay present and engaged with life and with me, I so appreciated Sherman’sability to skillfully tell her story, with all of its complexity and love.
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
As a therapist, I find it incredibly important to read books about mental health, particularly stories like this where our mental health system failed someone. I enjoyed the split timeline narration and the author's vulnerability. I can also tell that writing this must have been incredibly healing for the author as she was forced to confront her mother's reality and learn what it means to grieve someone that you (for better or worse) already said goodbye to years ago. It tackles the fact that the mother Suzanne is grieving is not necessarily the same mother who took her own life.
This was very well done and handles the difficult content in a way that is approachable for most readers!
Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for an advanced copy!
This was very well done and handles the difficult content in a way that is approachable for most readers!
Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for an advanced copy!
Review of advance copy received from Author
What a good book. Somehow, Suzanne Sherman’s graceful spiral through the arc of her experiences growing up with her schizophrenic mother, and the time after her mother’s suicide when Suzanne was 18, was compelling rather than depressing, and kept leaving me excited to come back and read more. Overall, I’m left with a deeper knowing of how mental illness in a family certainly paints broad brushstrokes as well as seeps into the nooks and crannies of daily life in an all-encompassing way.
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
Thanks to netgalley I was able to read this book long before publication.
And wow I would not have wanted to miss it.
This book gave me goosebumps all over. The way the experiences, and especially the emotions, are described in this book. Crushing, but at the same time so pure and real.
I loved reading this book and it really had me thinking!
Highly recommend, but check tw!!
And wow I would not have wanted to miss it.
This book gave me goosebumps all over. The way the experiences, and especially the emotions, are described in this book. Crushing, but at the same time so pure and real.
I loved reading this book and it really had me thinking!
Highly recommend, but check tw!!
Review of advance copy received from Author
As a daughter who, like Suzanne, experienced her mother's journey of mental illness and ultimately her suicide, I resonated deeply with the subject matter of this poignant memoir and was honored to be an early reader. "Living in the Long Shadow" is a beautiful and powerful book and is a testament to Suzanne's mastery of the craft of memoir. Like Suzanne, my own mother faced an impossible choice between the medication that kept her mental illness at bay and the soul it stole from her. And, after a 20+ year struggle, she ultimately made the same choice, choosing suicide as her only escape from a tortured, medicated existence.
It captures what it feels like to witness the devolution of one's parent and the feelings of helplessness, anticipatory loss, and concerns about one's own mental wellness that it evokes. It drew me in from the first page and kept me engaged until its last. Suzanne brought to life her childhood experience in 60s and 70s Southern California, at times making me feel as if I was sitting in her mother's smoke-filled living room.
I particularly loved the dual timeline structure she used that wove the stories of her life before and immediately after her mother's suicide, which created a dramatic and dynamic tension I found captivating.
The shadow of maternal mental illness and suicide is long indeed, and it can also be a source of transformation for those with the resilience to survive it. Brava, Suzanne!
It captures what it feels like to witness the devolution of one's parent and the feelings of helplessness, anticipatory loss, and concerns about one's own mental wellness that it evokes. It drew me in from the first page and kept me engaged until its last. Suzanne brought to life her childhood experience in 60s and 70s Southern California, at times making me feel as if I was sitting in her mother's smoke-filled living room.
I particularly loved the dual timeline structure she used that wove the stories of her life before and immediately after her mother's suicide, which created a dramatic and dynamic tension I found captivating.
The shadow of maternal mental illness and suicide is long indeed, and it can also be a source of transformation for those with the resilience to survive it. Brava, Suzanne!
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews