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

There’s a scene midway through this memoir where thirteen-year-old Suzanne Sherman comes home to find her mother sitting cross-legged on the living room floor, playing Led Zeppelin. Her mother looks up with an eerie smile. Do you hear what they’re saying? They know. Sherman closes the door and never listens to that song again.

That’s how this book works. It doesn’t argue its case. It shows you the moment the floor drops.

Sherman grew up in the 1960s and ’70s West LA with a mother whose paranoid schizophrenia went undiagnosed for years and untreated for longer. Living in the Long Shadow reconstructs that childhood from the inside, not as a survivor’s manifesto, not as a clinical retrospective, but as a close read of specific, dateable memory.

The book is full of scenes that carry more weight than they first appear to. A mother who lets her thirteen-year-old daughter smoke Marlboros, then gets caught stealing cigarettes from her pack. A family dinner where Sherman calls the KFC bucket a “rare treat,” and you realize what that detail is doing a sentence later, when the mother announces she’s been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. Sherman doesn’t signal the pivot. She trusts you to feel it.

She’s also good on the specific texture of a childhood spent reading adults. When Sherman’s mother whispers that they have a telescope trained on their phone number, Sherman’s response is to stay calm and practical. She’s twelve and already managing the room. The skill is bone-deep by then. She’s been practicing since she was four.

What separates this from the crowded shelf of mental illness memoirs is Sherman’s refusal to sentimentalize either the mother or herself. Marilyn Sherman was a Wellesley graduate who sang Brahms on Channel 9 and marched in candlelight peace protests with a guitar strapped to her chest. She was also a woman who believed the Mafia stole her earrings. Her daughter holds both of these truths without flinching. The portrait that results is fully dimensional: a person, not a diagnosis.

Sherman is equally unsentimental about the era’s failures. Thorazine paralyzed part of Marilyn’s face. It killed her concentration. Her psychiatrist kept her on it anyway, then added a second antipsychotic on top. The rage in Sherman’s telling of this is the cold kind — more damning for being understated.

The book has one real structural problem: due to the dual timeline, the story tends to lose momentum in parts. By the third act, the back and forth feels less like counterpoint and more like obligation.

That’s a craft issue, not a vision one. The vision here is clear, and the execution is mostly equal to it. Sherman spent decades writing toward this book, and you feel that patience in the prose in the way it refuses shortcuts and the way it earns its grief scene by scene.