The author's book shares several aspects of her son's illness and how she and her husband, and their other son, Ben, survived Paul's suicide, as it:

1) describes the frustration, anger, and guilt of trying to care for an adult child with mental illness
2) gives mothers and fathers who have experienced a child's death ways to get out of the deep dark hole they are in,
3) tells people the realities of mental illness,
4) describes the steps Sharples took in living with this loss; the first and foremost that she chose to liveand go on with life and take care of herself as a woman, wife, mother, writer, and
5) shows readers that grief is love in action. To let ourselves grieve is to feel the depth of our love for as long as it takes. For those of us whose children have died, that may take the rest of our lives, but we will discover the gifts of our loss in the process.

"Madeline Sharples has written a poetically visceral, emotionally honest account of her experience with her son's bipolar disorder, his suicide, and her family's grief and gradual adaptation to their terrible loss. I know I will not only be a better, more empathic psychiatrist but a better person and friend after reading this extraordinary memoir." Irvin D. Godofsky, M.D.

Leaving the Hall Light On is available for purchase at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and independent bookstores.

ISBN: 978-0-9846317-2-8

Publisher: Lucky Press LLC

Format: Hardcover with dust jacket; 336 pages; photographs

Download two sample chapters here (PDF) 

After high school in Wichita, college in Dallas and graduate school in Austin, where she finished a Ph.D. in British Lit, she taught at Yale for five years before hoofin' it west to San Francisco in 1993. And there, for the most part, she's stayed. Except for a semester in Caracas, a semester in Barcelona, a semester in Budapest, and three years living half-time in L.A. Oh, and after 17 years of living in The City, recently moving to Oakland.

She's been at the University of San Francisco since 1993, teaching literature and creative nonfiction.  There, she has won the Distinguished Teaching Award and the College Service Award, and spent a year as the NEH Chair in Humanities, during which time she began writing My Ruby Slippers. In addition to teaching, she is the co-director of the Center for Teaching Excellence and runs a program for supporting faculty writing. So she spends a lot of time organizing writing groups, salons and workshops, determined to change writing from a solitary to a community activity. In the midst of it all, and above all, she's raised two smart and darkly witty daughters who now live too far away.

For the moment, Tracy lives in Oakland with her husband Frederick Marx, a filmmaker. There, she grows vegetables, writes, grades papers, and hangs out on her stoop, talking to neighbors. She is plotting to acquire some backyard chickens. She figures if she gets chickens, she'll never have to move again.

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