Season 2025: Episode 6. Sandra Schnakenburg shares how she kept a promise to her housekeeper and became a writer in the proccess

Award Winning Memoir Author Sandra SchnakenburgI grew up in Barrington, Illinois.  After earning a B.S. in Finance at Arizona State University and an MBA from the University of Southern California, she settled with her husband, Karl,  in Singapore, then Australia — where their twins, Kyle and Alexis, were born.  After moving back to the United States, the family lived in The Woodlands, Texas, where Karl and she raised their family. During that time, Sandra worked on and off in corporate finance until she took up the love of writing. A philosophy of curiosity and a promise led her to write her first Memoir, The Housekeeper’s Secret - a personal story to fulfill her family’s housekeeper’s dying wish. In the process, she  grew fascinated by the mechanics of storytelling and the power it holds, connecting family through the generations. 

After interviewing Sandra, I read her book and found the true story of her family and her housekeeper's life absorbing and so moving! What a great book.

You can reach Sandra on her website:

https://www.sandraschnakenburg.com/

She offers support for writers on her website too.

Find her book, "The Housekeeper's Secret -- A Memoir" on Amazon or whereever you get your books:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1647427606/?bestFormat=true&k=the%20housekeeper%27s%20secret%20a%20memoir%20by%20sandra%20schnakenburg&ref_=nb_sb_ss_w_scx-ent-pd-bk-d_de_k2_1_24&crid=2X43M3QO2L4ED&sprefix=The%20Housekeeper%27s%20Secret

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Original music "Saturday Sway" by Brendan Talian (for all interviews before 2025)

Transcript

Unknown Speaker  0:35  
I'd like to update this interview, because it's been a little while since I talked to Sandra. I got a chance to read her book. It's called The Housekeeper's Secret -- A Memoir. It is such a great book. I enjoyed it so much, and I wanted to make sure I got that in. And I just wanted to say it's a very touching story, and it's hard to believe at times that it's true, because it reads like a beautiful novel. It's just very well written and really

Unknown Speaker  1:07  
full of descriptions of Sandra's family and all the things they went through, and all of the mystery surrounding Lee her housekeeper, and then finally, in the end, you get to find out what the secret is. I really enjoyed it. It's a great read, and I wanted to make sure I said that. So now we're going to start the interview. Thank you for listening to the storied human.

Unknown Speaker  1:33  
Hi and welcome to The Storied Human. I'm Lynne Thompson. I have my guest today, award-winning author Sandra Schnakenberg. She's going to tell us the story, and it's a wonderful one about how she ended up leaving corporate finance after 30 years

Unknown Speaker  1:50  
to fulfill a promise to her housekeeper and tell her story. She wrote a book, and it won an award, and we're here to we're here for it. Welcome, Sandra,

Unknown Speaker  2:02  
thank you, Lynne, thanks for having me on your podcast.

Unknown Speaker  2:07  
Yes, I'm not sure where to start. Okay, I'm so I'm dying to read your book,

Unknown Speaker  2:14  
and I love that you kept the secret. You know you kept the promise to tell the secret. Yeah, so can you give me just a little sense of a timeline? Because just I know the housekeeper asked you to wait until she had passed to write the book. So how long between when she asked you this to when she passed and you wrote it?

Unknown Speaker  2:35  
Well, that's that's an intriguing question. First, it's been 30 years since she's been gone, and the book is finally published. So I started, I found, I found Lee's ashes. She died in 1994 I found her ashes my mom's closet, 15 years after she died, and I said, Oh my god, the promise I made to Lee. I need to go find the burial spots of her husband and son, which she told us had passed in a tragic car accident before she came to our house to work as a housekeeper. So I searched and searched and searched to put her ashes and reunite them with her family, and I found nothing. I didn't find that she was married or that she had a child that died, and it was just a mystery of what who was Lee. But eventually, through much research, I found that she wasn't the person she said she was. Her name her, and I'm not giving any spoilers here, this is not a secret. This part her name, her birth date, and her past story was all fabricated for her to get the job as our housekeeper. I was three and a half when she arrived, and she stayed 30 years. So on her deathbed, she asked me to write her story, a story. She always said, I have a story, and nobody will ever believe one day I'm going to write a book. Well, lung cancer ended up getting her too early. She was 72

Unknown Speaker  4:06  
and she asked me, she goes, I ran out of time. Could you write my story? And I said, Lee, you never told me your story. I've asked you a million times over the years. I got punished and sent to my room, and my mom reprimanded me, if you keep asking Lee and prying about her past, she's going to leave, so I never knew her story. And she said, Well, will you try to write it? And I said, I will try when the time is right. And then, you know, she died shortly after, and I didn't know her story then. So I was, you know,

Unknown Speaker  4:38  
just married, and I was

Unknown Speaker  4:40  
pregnant with twins, and I started my life. So all that happened. Then 15 years later, when my mom died, I found the ashes, right? So that's when I triggered the inciting incident. When they say you have an inciting incident, what triggered the story? It's like, I'm going to go find the burial spots. Well, the burial spots didn't exist. So why? Why? Why? Why? Who?

Unknown Speaker  5:00  
Was this person and I and and that's the investigative journey part of the story that takes the reader down a crazy, you know, suspenseful journey. And it's just such a shock, and it's so

Unknown Speaker  5:15  
it was shock to our family. It took me about five years to put pen to paper after I realized what happened to her, because our whole family just went like paralyzed. She goes, How do we know Lee so well? She raised us. She was the best thing that ever happened to our family, yet we didn't even know anything about her past. And now here she is. She wants this story told, and she's put this assignment on me. So it took me after that another,

Unknown Speaker  5:44  
I would say, from 2015

Unknown Speaker  5:47  
now it's 2025 I mean, it came out in December 24 that's 10 years. I would say 2015 I really, I just started, you know,

Unknown Speaker  5:57  
practicing writing. I studied writing. I was in a finance background for 30 years, so I had to go back to classes, study writing, read many, many writing books. I got obsessed with the idea of learning how to write on my own and make it like getting my own MFA. And I wrote a lot of essays that I wrote the book in essay form. Originally, that was probably in 2020, it was all an essay form, and I thought that was a great way to tell the story. But it wasn't good enough. It wasn't good enough. It didn't flow enough. It was too choppy. So there was like another rewrite, and then another rewrite, and then a past present, and lo and behold, the whole journey, I would say, I would well, it depends on where you want to start. The timeline. I mean, it's 30 years from when she died. It would be like, you know, 10 years. Well, my mom died in, you know, it was like 15 years after she died. Then, then, of course, that it's, you know, took another five or six years to discover the truth, and then another 10 years to write the book. So basically, the story kept haunting me to finish and I kept quitting, yeah, and you didn't give up. I didn't thought so fascinating, because when you hear the the title of the book, you just think, Oh, she told her her secret, and she kept it like you kept that secret and you waited until after she passed to tell it. That's what we're all assuming when we hear that. But that's not true. It was much harder and much more pro prolonged, and yet you didn't give up. That's right. Well, I wanted to know why she lied about who she was, and then I got that so ridiculous. Yeah, that's so hard to believe. She lived in our house. We lived on a 44 acre estate. We were very isolated, and, yeah, she didn't want to be found and she didn't want to be found out. And that's why she liked our families, that she could hide out and nobody could find her. And she ended up being this, this amazing lady, like, to our family and to my mom, and, you know, to me, she was, she was just everything. So it was she got to be who she really wanted to be, without her past haunting her.

Unknown Speaker  8:07  
That's so wonderful that she found a haven with you, but so weird that, you know, after the fact, we have to re examine who we thought somebody was. That's like, so that's a head trip, right? That was a head trip, yeah, you grew up with her. She was a question about that too. Like, who, who was she? Was she the person that she was labeled before she came to our house? Or was she was really the, the real person we had was her, because she got to be who she was without any label.

Unknown Speaker  8:38  
You know, it just sounds like she was so loving and and such a nice member of your family that that's who she really was, and you allowed her to be that. But it's so bizarre that somebody could change so much of their identity. Although, you know, you do hear about people having to do such things, it's hard to imagine pulling that off. Absolutely. I mean, she pulled it off and well, especially with a family that was intimately close with her, we she knew every one of every person in our family's secrets. She was the person we all went to because she never told anybody's secrets, and she had, we had so much confidence and trust in her, but everything about her was a lie at the end of the day, we didn't know. Yeah, so that's really interesting, that she pulled it off. And I think a part of her felt really bad about that, because, because that's why she waited, and that it's kind of a God ordained timing, because my, my, we didn't find her ashes until my mom passed away. I'm sure that part of her prayer was that my mom would never know she lied, because I think she was so close to my mom, and everything about those two together were just inseparable, like they really, they really held each other through life's toughest times, and I think and Lee not being able to open up, because I think she felt better.

Unknown Speaker  10:00  
Having to tell my mom that she had lied to get the job.

Unknown Speaker  10:04  
And yet it was that, remember, it's the days before computers and background checks and, you know, Google or anything like that. And she kind of knew when the computer age was coming out, because she died in 94

Unknown Speaker  10:16  
so, you know, computers were starting to come out now, and information was starting to be accessible, and I think she kind of had an intuition that sooner or later, we would figure it out, or I would figure it out, maybe, yeah, right, but it was, it was going to get harder to hide. Yes, I'm so intrigued that she kept secrets so well too. That's so interesting. She knew she knew how to keep your secrets.

Unknown Speaker  10:42  
Yeah, she was very much of confident confidant.

Unknown Speaker  10:46  
So we don't want to give it away, but we want to talk about what surprised you the most, right? As you uncovered

Unknown Speaker  10:56  
Well, I think it was a big surprise to me that she was hiding out in our estate for 30 years as didn't want to be found and didn't want to be found out, and people were looking for her.

Unknown Speaker  11:10  
Well, yeah, and they were, they were stopped at the agency. She had left very strict,

Unknown Speaker  11:17  
you know,

Unknown Speaker  11:19  
like in her file was a very strict note, like it was locking under lock and key, and no one would ever was allowed to reveal what family she was. She had gone to, to live with. That's so amazing. That's kind of scary, too. Yeah, she had to go to that level of Yeah. But they ended up tracking her all the way there, the people that were looking for. And so it that part was that she really pulled it off. Also, like in all the days, she just wanted to live for the moment. She she was the only person I ever met that lived in the essence the present moment so fully, like she enjoyed every moment like and and I looked at her because I worried about the past and I was worried about the future. You know, I was, like, always overthinking everything, and I was in that place where we were having a lot

Unknown Speaker  12:12  
of psychological issues in the family. There was verbal abuse, there was insecurities, there was, I had a car accident, there was,

Unknown Speaker  12:21  
you know, difficulty healing. There was, there was all that. And I just looked at Lee and I said, How does she have that contentment and joy? I want some of that. I know, hang out with her, just for that.

Unknown Speaker  12:35  
Why do you think she did? Was she just so grateful to get away from her old life? Well, I think it has a lot to do with what happened. Has she did have traumatic brain injury. We can't say how, but

Unknown Speaker  12:48  
we will say that I do think that she, you know, had gotten to the point where you can I think it's up to the reader if they want to decide if it's the treatments that caused her long term memory, or if it was something that she chose to forget, and that people do, that they have selective memory, there's a lot of things the reader can digest and make, you know conclusions themselves. I didn't really direct the reader to the answer, because I know I didn't know the answer. I She's not alive for me to ask her anymore. And I do think if you put all the pieces together

Unknown Speaker  13:31  
that she you know this is the way she wanted it. She wanted it. She wanted us to be able to figure it out. She wanted us to decide who she was. But the person, the essence of her was that spirit in that the present moment. You know, her cup was full. She was always ready to give help, love. Everything about her was like, of a healthy minded person.

Unknown Speaker  13:53  
But how did she get there, after all she'd been through, is the question too, of the day. Like, right you, when you hear her story, you're like, How does somebody do that? It's like, Victor Frankel's book. I refer to that a lot. Oh yeah, yeah. It was like, it's called the meaning of life. And he survived the Holocaust. Had lost everything. They took his manuscript, which they didn't have computers then. And, you know, his wife and children were all, you know, killed, and he, you know, and all his friends there were committing suicide day after day. So he's like, how does one rise above all of it and thrive when they get out of there and become something that you can give back to life, like, Who giving back to the world something good of yourself after so much bad has happened to you?

Unknown Speaker  14:39  
That's a question. I mean, is it a gift? Is it a, you know, innate seed that was planted from God? Is it a

Unknown Speaker  14:46  
it's a choice. It is really a choice that Lee made.

Unknown Speaker  14:51  
That's amazing. I've read that book. It was so powerful. I remember he said the best of us did not survive. Wait that he just like i.

Unknown Speaker  15:00  
You know, you could have just like, knocked me out at that point. I was like, I never even thought of that. Yeah, best of us did not survive. And he talks about the people that are more generous and giving, and you don't know how you'll react in any situation. And I, you know, I'm just so struck by where you are at the time, right? I know that I've been brave at certain times in my life, I've been not so brave at other times. It just depends where you are when these things happen to you, where you are in your life, how resilient you're feeling,

Unknown Speaker  15:32  
or even if you have, if you have a knowing, it's kind of an inner knowing that you have a bigger purpose. Somewhere out there, there is somebody like, I know my mom was on her knees every day praying for somebody like Lee. And isn't that something? She's probably on the other side praying for a family like ours that she can be a part of and accept her just the way she was. We didn't even have to go out of our way to accept her. We just loved her the way she was. We never The only rule was you're not allowed to ask her about your past, yeah, yeah. But when I did, I got older, she got really upset, but um, nevertheless, she ended up asking me to write her book. And I know nothing about her. It's so that's that blows my mind. Now, why do you think she felt compelled to leave her story with you? LIKE to let you research it and tell it. Why did she What was that impulse?

Unknown Speaker  16:24  
One, she wanted her story to be told when she wasn't around anymore,

Unknown Speaker  16:32  
and when my mom wasn't around, as I mentioned earlier, but but more importantly, I think she knew that I would figure it out because I was so inquisitive and curious and always prying. And I knew something, something was off, something was missing. Why didn't we celebrate these people's birthdays when or their day they died? What was the day that they had this tragic accident like these? These pictures were on her mirror for 30 years, like till the day she died. Of these people that I think she got the pictures maybe at a Goodwill or something, wow, literally,

Unknown Speaker  17:04  
what? Like, I just couldn't understand why she didn't, like, say, oh, today's the day might lost my husband, and this is the day of the accident. Like you'd think, at least over the period of time, maybe that would come up, you know, yes, right? You know, maybe in a moment's kind of tender moment or something, but nothing. So I just felt like there was something up.

Unknown Speaker  17:27  
You were like, a little investigator, yeah, yeah. And I did feel it. I had a lot of intuitive, you know, curiosity. As a child, I used to think like, like, when my, you know, well, when things were happening with my dad, I had an intuition what he was up to, and I just felt it, you know, it's that that's just something that happened. Yeah, I have that too. Now, I know faith is really important to you, and it sounds like your mother had a lot of faith.

Unknown Speaker  17:57  
Did you get the sense that Lee had? Did faith help guide her Absolutely. Yeah, when she was raised in a Creole family, and that was discovered later after she died, it was a very famous family, and there's a museum on her whole family Louisiana. It's pretty wild, but she had many, many priests in her family. There's a a church, Saint Augustine in the Cane River that has which I visited with my husband. And all the, you know, people were buried in the back of the church are all metoyers, like, it's amazing, and they're the priests and the people who ran the whole town. They're all her family. They had the biggest plantation there back in the day.

Unknown Speaker  18:41  
So when I said to her, when we were growing up, I'm like, we went to church on Sundays, our family, and I'm like, Leah, because she I knew she was Catholic, and that's what connected her. And with my mom, they prayed a lot. They didn't pray together. They prayed separately. But she kept Saint Jude in her pocket all the time, every day, the Saint Jude prayer. And I, I'd ask her, like, what is that? And she was the prayer of the hopeless and the helpless. Oh, wow. No, it would. I was like, who I go, you're not hopeless and helpless. I go, we're hopeless and helpless. Why are you praying that for you when we're the ones that are hopeless and helpless? And she was like, Oh, honey, you have no idea, you know, like, that kind of thing. And I was like, wow, now I know why, right? So she did pray every day. She probably went downstairs and prayed a lot for now, I know what for all these other things we found out. But I think

Unknown Speaker  19:32  
she also, I She also said, I said, Why don't you come to church with us on Sunday? And she goes, Oh, honey, she goes, I went to church every single day of my life growing up enough times to cover me till the day I die.

Unknown Speaker  19:44  
So that was her whole thing is, like, it's not about going to church. It was about being with God in prayer. Yeah, I'm a lot like that. Now, I mean, I I don't think you have to go to church, like, it's not like it's like a duty to make you feel good, but it's also like, maybe some people feel closer to God, but I think.

Unknown Speaker  20:00  
Could still go closer to God if you're deeply in meditation and prayer anywhere, or even light a candle when you're doing, you know, I think that's also very, you can get very connected to God, right there with you.

Unknown Speaker  20:12  
We recently had to go to a funeral, and my husband was raised Catholic, so it's, you know, it's, I wasn't raised Catholic. So it's always kind of a big to do for me, because it's just, there's more stuff going on, but I really felt at peace with respecting the fact that I

Unknown Speaker  20:30  
don't know. I just didn't it didn't irritate me the way it did when I was younger. I just felt really peaceful that God was there and that people,

Unknown Speaker  20:38  
you know, people, were going through this beautiful ritual and and soothing each other. And I don't know, I just see it like I always say on this podcast, there's a lot of ways up the mountain. Yeah, I think, I think what my faith grew a lot when I just started questioning everything and learning it on my own, and then now going back to church. Now it's more it's more fulfilling. Yeah, and I do love tradition, and I love ritual. I think it's wonderful the way they marry in the church, and the way they, you know, bury in the church. I mean, I think that's all great. My my daughter chose not to get married in the church, and it was kind of a falling out in the family. But you know what Christ was, God was everywhere. We were in a beautiful field, and it was just all over, you know, and it was, when I think about it, it doesn't matter, as long as their beautiful hearts are in the Lord, it's fine. It's a beautiful thought. My daughter also married outside of the church. They married in a park right near the tree where my my daughter's husband used to sit under this tree when they were communicating with each other and and

Unknown Speaker  21:41  
it's funny, you're reminding me and my dad, who loved nature so much, and he used to go to this, like, wild place in Canada that was like 40 miles away from civilization. They would go down these, you know, just to fish in these, like lakes where no one went hardly. And he always told me that that was his cathedral,

Unknown Speaker  22:01  
that the forest was his cathedral, and that's how we were raised. So my mother was like, super Lutheran, and we went to church. We were raised in the church, and all that was lovely. I'm so glad I was it's nice to have a tradition that you that you sort of, you know, not move on from, but incorporate, right? You just, you keep moving through your life as you get older and

Unknown Speaker  22:23  
but what a beautiful thing that you said. You know that you just saw that when we're in nature, there's no way you know that that's not closer to God too. You know God's house and nature.

Unknown Speaker  22:38  
Do you think that her faith helped sustain her like the praying every day. I think God pulled her through all of it and even brought her to us. It was like a divine appointment, you know. And when you read the story, you know, this is a, this is a

Unknown Speaker  22:58  
thing that it's almost like your time warped, because, you know, Lee was born in 1922

Unknown Speaker  23:03  
Wow died in 1994

Unknown Speaker  23:06  
WoW had like,

Unknown Speaker  23:09  
you know, these, these chunks of time, you know, with this strict family, with what happened to her, and all that healing was a huge part of her time. And then 30 years with our family, and then she died so she had

Unknown Speaker  23:22  
but through it all, it was God ordained, because she really and even for our family, the way she came into the center of the the pain and the the crumbling of the family. And she was the uplifting spirit, the healer, the words of wisdom, the empowerment my mom needed to get through a narcissist marriage. She was so much to our family that we never we never realized it,

Unknown Speaker  23:52  
but we always realized it, but we never gave it the depth of thought until the I wrote the book, just seeing the whole thing for full circle. Gave, you know, us appreciation for how, how it was all divine appointment, and it was all divinely meant to be. And this story now that is resonating with so many people in so many different ways, with mental health, family life,

Unknown Speaker  24:22  
just so many secrets, identity crisises, people grasp onto the areas that they're struggling with, because there's so many issues in the book, and it's out there in the world, and people are it's helping people like, heal, you know, or even identify or open up about their problems, I get texts and notes every day about a new reader, like a stranger that I've never heard of across the country that is so touched by the book.

Unknown Speaker  24:51  
And I don't know how that happens, but it's a beautiful experience, because we connect with other human beings, and you obviously did that in this book.

Unknown Speaker  25:00  
Book and you were honest about what was happening in your family, which is very healing. When people hear that, they're like, Oh, well, I'm not the only one, and they can see how it went with your family. It's just amazing to me that we don't remember all the time how connected we really are. Oh, I know that's that's where, you know, it takes God in another level when you think we're all put here and surrounded by the kind of people that we're supposed to be with, our families and our friends. Know everybody's with around us for a reason, even people we I ran into during writing this story, discovering the story was like, synchronicities happened. Every time I was ready to quit, I'm like, something happened, and it was like a bread crumb dropped from the sky. All of a sudden I got another, you know, information that took me to the next level, right when I was at the end of my rope. I love that, and I do. I think if we can be quiet and we can be observant, right, and not be all like, obsessed with. The next thing we have to do, we can, we can see those synchronicities, and we can receive those messages. I had that happen on a recent trip to Florida. Somebody just walked by. I was sitting in a park, and she said, Hi, and we said hi, and she just had this beautiful smile. And I just, you know, just really enjoyed. I told her she was so lucky to have such a nice park, because I was from New Jersey, and it was freezing, and she's, she laughed and smiled and kept going. And, you know, I really still didn't feel well. I had taken the trip to try to get the sunshine and and I was like, really,

Unknown Speaker  26:35  
it was a day I was flying out. I was really looking forward to getting home. And she, you know, she went to her car, and then a couple minutes later, she came back, and she sat on the bench next to me, and she said, I hope you don't mind, but I was in my car, and I was praying, and God gave me a message for you. Oh, my God, because I had seen her earlier. I had been sitting on the other side of the park, and she had been at a picnic table with all these papers, and she was writing and studying and and she said, Well, I was over there, you know, writing my spiritual practice that I do. And she said, God gave me a message for you. And it was such a beautiful moment. And I told my when I told this to a friend, I said I could imagine a time when I was younger that I'd be like, Excuse me, you know, I wouldn't be like, weird about it, but I'm older now, and I'm open, and I know intuitively that this is a beautiful soul, and I'll take it, you know, I'll take the message. And she said the message was,

Unknown Speaker  27:35  
it's a little bit of a rough time now, but you will have peace.

Unknown Speaker  27:40  
And I just was like, how did she even know? I mean, I just smiled at her. I didn't seem like I was having a rough time, but she knew, because she's connected, you know, and she's a stranger. And we started talking, and I started telling her about how I did go there alone, because my husband's really busy with work, and he's like, No, you need the sunshine, go, take a couple days, I'll come get you when you come home. And I told her that, and she's like, wow. And then I just kept talking to her, and she said, I thought I came here to give you a message, but I'm also getting that my husband and I can do more, because her husband is, you know, still rehabbing from a COVID coma. He was, like, really sick. And she said, I'm so inspired with how you do things on your own, because we had talked about some of the things that I had done in Florida previously, and she said, I live here and I haven't done those things. And it was just this beautiful exchange that I don't think everyone has all the time. If you're not open to it, you have to be open. Yeah, totally. And it's, it's, and you can really take away a lot when you're open with

Unknown Speaker  28:48  
I gave her a big hug. I was like, this is such a gift. And I felt uplifted both by the beautiful park, which, by the way, my friend who I was texting with, I was like, I gotta get home and I'll, I'll talk to you soon. And she's like, why don't you try to find a park because I had hours before my flight, and the idea that there was a park in Orlando, because I went to Orlando, because I feel safer there, and there's, you know, lots of people, and I stayed at a place where there's a lot of people, and I was like, there's no Park in Orlando, you know, it's like, this crazy place with way too many buildings and but There was this beautiful park by a lake, so my friend got me to the park, and this beautiful stranger, Mala,

Unknown Speaker  29:29  
told me I'd be okay. That's awesome. And that's I just needed that little boost, you know. So I totally trust and believe in what you're saying. And I I'm so struck with how she found your family. Yeah, it's pretty amazing. And I prayed for her, yeah, my mom was praying for her. We were praying for somebody like her, and then it turned out to be a perfect match. So it's, it's really a lovely story. It makes people reflect on their, you know? It makes people think about a lot of different things, like all their.

Unknown Speaker  30:00  
Different what they're connecting in the story, and also, also how to tell story like it's very much written like fiction. So it takes the reader in an emotional roller coaster. It's an emotional revolution. It's really grabs your heart. It stays with you for a while. I get

Unknown Speaker  30:17  
that a lot people say I can't get the story out of my head. It's hard to believe this really happened. You know, it's we're not like one of those things. The truth is stranger than fiction, yeah, yeah. And there is such a power in story, yeah? So people, they resonate with that, with that form. So how has this left you? I mean, you're obviously a writer. Now, I noticed you even have a blog on your website,

Unknown Speaker  30:38  
and that you actually help people write their stories? Yeah, well, I'm I offer people a direction when they want to write a story. So many people have come up to me, like, I have a story. How do I Where do I begin? And I struggled with that, because I was, like, my first thing I did when I figured out the story, I Googled how to write a book. It was the most fundamental thing. And I bought one book called The plot whisper, and I thought that book was going to teach me how to write a book. And after I read that book, I'll write my book. So that's how naive I was. And literally, like, Who do I think I am when there's people that have gone to school for, you know, got an MFA, a master's, a PhD, whatever, in writing and creative, creative writing, and they still haven't wrote a book, or they're teaching writing, or they're editing, whatever they're doing, they're doing great things. What I'm saying is, I don't have any skills that I was thinking, How do I do this? So I ended up spending a lot of time learning how to write and reading, writing books, taking classes at Rice University, and then,

Unknown Speaker  31:40  
you know, reading memoir, lots of different memoir, so I can see how they laid out story. I can see the arc, you know, the hero's journey kind of thing. You really start understanding the concept of story and plotting when you, you know, work with, work with some kind of like script, you know, tools when you have to create tools, where I call it a toolkit, a writing toolkit. And every time I get a book, I learned more tools to put in my toolkit for when I sat down to write this, I pulled that tool out of how to do dialog or how to create scene with senses, and how to, you know, bring in blah, blah, blah. I mean, it was very challenging, because every thing I did was it almost like my husband would come back from work and that'd be eight hour day and I and I, he'd go, how'd you do on the writing? And be like I got two sentences done.

Unknown Speaker  32:41  
But see you respected the process and understood how difficult it can be. I'm impressed by that. Did you have an editor like did you go through a publishing company? I went through a hybrid publishing. I had an agent at first that pitched it to the big five, and this is before it's in its final you know what I have now, and they pitched it to the big five, and the Big Five rejected it. So I got rid of the agent, and I got the hybrid publisher. It's okay, because it wasn't where we needed to be at anyway. And through the hybrid publisher, I went back and found an editor that was kind of an outside editor, and I really liked her. I did like shopping for editors at a conference. You do speed dating, you go through tables to every 20 minutes, you interview editors for like, a couple hours, and you you can kind of see if there's a connection. I found one that really connected and understood what I wanted to get out of this story, and how do I want to present it. I was at the very last draft, and all she did was take it to the next level, in the way that my concept, you know, met my concept, like we would just try a chapter and say, Okay, let's just see what you can do, what your editing looks like. And she, she was pretty ruthless, though. I mean, it was a gut punching experience, because she took a lot of my, what they call your darlings, and writing out they're my creative, you know, really masterpiece sentences and and then I realized, but she said, this isn't about showing off and being a good writer. This is about telling a story you just wanted to be all story. She had that other view. It's hard, though, when people cut your words. The first time that happened to me, I was like, what?

Unknown Speaker  34:19  
Really hard? You took out 30,000 words, and then I had, she had me replaced 30,000 more, but she prompt me with questions on what to write.

Unknown Speaker  34:28  
So that was really great. And I ended up writing deeper into those areas that expanded the thought and kept the theme, you know, and the thread throughout the story, and it just kind of filled the gap where the story was kind of losing the focus. It brought it back to those little parts that the transitions happen. You know, that's so cool. Yeah. So what would Lee think of this book? I would love to know your your thoughts. That's a great question. I would say. She would say, thank you. Thank you. I'm really happy what you did.

Unknown Speaker  35:00  
Is exactly what I wanted. And of course, I didn't,

Unknown Speaker  35:04  
I didn't know what you know, how she felt when all these things were happening, because I couldn't interview her. So it was a blessing. It's a blessing too, because you don't want to go there. I think what I did is exactly what she wanted her story to be told happened to her in a way that connects everything. It connected all of us, like her, our family, to William. Now you touched briefly that on your dad being a narcissist and and the difficulty that presented. Did he pass away before your mom? Or did you have to keep dealing with your dad? How did that? Yeah, he passed away timeline in 2021 actually. So it's not, I was almost on my last, you know, round of the book, yeah, or passed away. He never read the book. He he knew I was writing a book, but he didn't even care. He was very self you know, I mean, yeah, you're self absorbed.

Unknown Speaker  35:58  
He

Unknown Speaker  36:02  
my Yeah, my mom, my mom, my dad, is just kind of sad because we never really made peace with that whole narcissist thing. I think it was just watching him. He ended up, you know, his second marriage was somewhat sad because he didn't have the same love my mom had, you know, there was just, it was all about money, really.

Unknown Speaker  36:27  
And he actually married, you know, I don't want to, like, make cut. You probably could cut this part out, but

Unknown Speaker  36:35  
probably not even worth it. Talk, it was painful, no, but there's a backdrop be abused at the end. He, you know, he was very abused, and it was elderly abuse, and it was, he was sorry. That was very hard, but, but some people say, Well, maybe he, you know, maybe it's full circle, but it's, you never want to wish anything bad about anybody, but, but it was, but, the but the part of him that was sad is kind of, he died to the family before he died, right? Not because of, you know, he did have dementia, but it's because he was, he was, his ideas were, you know, you know, his his self was robbed. He lost his self, you know, yeah, through the abuse, yeah.

Unknown Speaker  37:19  
So that was hard, you know? Well, I'm so sorry with him, right? So it was like, oh my god, this is circle too, but it is what it is, yeah, yeah. Been through a lot, yeah, it was a lot. And why, why? Yeah. But I think we learn, live and learn, yeah, yeah, we do. I lost my mom kind of early, like my kids were little, and it really did impact everything. Yeah, and you do, you learn. I just think if you let it, it teaches you to be more compassionate and understand that. Yeah, exactly. You take the lessons and you leave the pain, and you let the pain go, you forgive and you remember the good things, and you move on and you just make every day. I mean, keep loving our kids and keep loving our family and our husbands and you know, it's all good. It really is a wonderful sentiment. I'm great. It's a great way to end. Is there anything else that we didn't talk about that you would like to add?

Unknown Speaker  38:20  
I would like to add one thing. I think it's, it's not what happens to you in life, you know, it's what you do with what happens to you. I think that's really important to think about, because we, everyone in the world, has stuff, and every you know, stuff happens to everyone. It could be little or big, but the impact is, you know, huge and even little things. And I would say it's what you do with that. You know, Lee really taught us that in a big way. And I think also I've learned that with the pains and sufferings that our family have gone through, is we've taken the good and healed the healed the pain and moved on and making the best of every day, because do you only get this one life, and here you go.

Unknown Speaker  39:06  
That's a beautiful thing, and so good to remember. And I just feel like part of your strength, I mean, definitely comes from your mom, but part of it comes from Lee too, that you were blessed to be, you know, raised by Lee

Unknown Speaker  39:20  
Absolutely. Yeah. That's a beautiful part of it

Unknown Speaker  39:25  
for sharing. I can't wait to read it now. I'm sure you've got us all, like, on, you know, Tinder hooks, like, oh, we gotta read it now, because we gotta know,

Unknown Speaker  39:35  
yeah, yeah, you'll, you'll love it. I'm sure you're gonna love it. I'd love to hear what you I will. I know I will, and I'm going to love whatever you write next, because I think you're on this, like writer's journey now. Absolutely thank you for coming on, and I really love talking to you. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Lynne.

Unknown Speaker  39:59  
Applause.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai