Memoirist Sandra Schnakenburg chats with me about her book, The Housekeeper’s Secret: A Memoir.
Bio:
Sandy Schnakenburg is a writer, mother, and truth-seeker with a background in finance, writing, community advocacy, and personal transformation. She holds a Bachelor of Science in Finance from Arizona State University and pursued graduate studies in business at the University of Southern California. When she’s not writing, Sandy can be found spending time with her family, hiking mountain trails, skiing fresh powder, or flowing through yoga. She and her husband, Karl, are nature lovers who split their time between Texas and Park City, Utah. Sandy has spent over a decade bringing The Housekeeper’s Secret to life—driven by a promise and a mission to amplify voices too often overlooked. She is passionate about truth-telling, legacy, and empowering women whose stories deserve to be heard.
Welcome, Sandy. Please tell us about your current release.
The Housekeeper’s Secret, released December 3, 2024, is a memoir uncovering hidden truths about a beloved housekeeper and the author’s own family. Blending investigative suspense with emotional reckoning, it explores psychological abuse while breaking racial, cultural, and gender barriers—ultimately revealing a powerful story of resilience, truth, and the shared depths of the human spirit.
What inspired you to write this book?
Lee Metoyer is hired to be our new housekeeper, she has no idea that she’s about to become the anchor of our a family in an abusive patriarch’s home, setting a mystery in motion that will take decades to uncover. At the age of seventy-two, Lee falls ill and on her deathbed asks Sandy to write her story. The only problem is, Sandy doesn’t know the story. This promise is what inspired Sandy to write the story.
Embarking on a quest to honor Lee’s final wishes, I take an emotional and thrilling journey, unveiling shocking truths not only about my beloved housekeeper but also her own upbringing. As she digs further, she learns that Lee came to her family’s sprawling estate in Barrington, IL, harboring a secret past. For decades, she’s been in hiding. But Lee is not the only one with secrets; my quest forces me to grapple with my own family history as well, and to finally confront the effects of the psychological abuse I suffered as a child.
Both a chilling and exciting personal tale of love and survival, The Housekeeper’s Secret is a gripping saga that illuminates the resilience of the human spirit.
Excerpt from The Housekeeper’s Secret:
On a cool autumn morning in October 1994, Mom stood whipping eggs at the marble-topped island in the kitchen. I was thirty-two years old, married, and living in Australia. I’d moved out of my childhood home fifteen years earlier, but once a year I flew home to visit Mom and Lee. Even as Lee had become frailer, as she’d grown thinner and quieter, Mom had avoided talking about what we were both thinking. But that morning, she turned to me and said gently, “Sandy, why don’t you spend some time with Lee today? She won’t be with us much longer.”
Lee not with us. A world without Lee in it? It was almost unthinkable.
Walking down the steps to the lower level of the house, I heard the raspy wheeze of Lee’s breathing and the whispering hiss of the oxygen machine. I tiptoed down the hall like a teenager hoping not to get caught coming home after midnight. The wall outside Lee’s bedroom was covered in cherished memories—framed photos documenting the nearly three decades she’d been with our family. Group shots near a concession stand at Wrigley Field. A Christmas photo of a joyful Lee dressed in her pristine white uniform, cradling her beloved Mr. Cub book. A picture of Lee propping me up when I was five and burdened by a full-length cast on my right leg. My First Communion photo with Lee and Mom on each side of me, this time with Lee the injured one, a stark white plaster cast running from her thigh to her foot.
Lee’s door was wide open, and she sat upright in bed, smiling. A tube traveled out of the oxygen tank, then split in two, and snaked to the back of her head and around to the front where two little tubes rested just inside her nostrils.
“Sandy,” she whispered, “come here and sit with me.”
I settled beside her on the light blue comforter, careful not to jostle her fragile frame. A slender beam of light shone through the little window in the corner, and my eyes darted to the dresser mirror where Lee’s most treasured photos were securely tucked in the space between the mirror and its frame. One photo of her beloved husband and another of their cherished little boy, both tragically taken from her in a devastating car wreck. She’d brought these precious mementos with her in 1965 when she first arrived to work for our family. Over the years, I must have studied the images hundreds of times, wishing I’d known the boy, wishing I could have played with him, wishing Lee had that husband to hold her hand. I thought, soon she’ll be reunited with them, the two souls she holds dearer than life.
Lee gently removed the oxygen tube from her nose and rested her frail hand on mine.
“Can I ask you something?” she whispered.
“Of course. Anything.”
“I never wrote that book I wanted to write. And now I’m running out of time.”
Many times through the years, Lee had said, “Someday I’m going to write a book, and nobody will believe it,” but she never said any more about it. And she never showed any interest in writing, never jotting so much as a draft of a short story, but oh, how she loved words. Her books, her crossword puzzles, her dictionary—they were some of her favorite things in the world.
What exciting project are you working on next?
I started a new story. It’s also a true story and I am not ready to share the details because it too premature.
When did you first consider yourself a writer?
I started unfolding the truth of this story in 2010-11 and began to study writing in 2015, published in 2024. 2015 I considered myself a novice writer but worked very hard at it for years.
Do you write full-time? If so, what’s your workday like? If not, what do you do other than write and how do you find time to write?
I quit my 30-year job in Corporate Finance where I managed $2B of pension funds to study writing full-time. My mother had just passed and I was going through a lot of changes rethinking what really made me happy. It was very difficult to self-discipline myself to write daily when I was not a trained writer, so I studied writing books obsessively for about three years, day and night. I loved it and would practice writing daily and work on my story every day. At that time I was taking writing classes consistently and formed a writing group to get feedback and beta readers for my story. It progressed, I finally finished the story, and found an agent on my first query. The agent changed the name of the story to Puzzle, which I wasn’t fond of and pitched it to the big five publishers. It was rejected by all five publishers, my agent and I parted ways and I changed the name back to The Housekeeper’s Secret and rewrote the story yet another time to make it more riveting and a page turner. Then I found She Writes Press. If I wasn’t writing I would be biking, yoga, hiking, skiing and reading and spending time with my family.
What would you say is your interesting writing quirk?
I enjoyed lighting a candle, making a cup of tea and having a bowl of granola nearby to munch on to think about the next sentence.
As a child, what did you want to be when you grew up?
I wanted to be free to express myself, I kept a lot of my thoughts inside and never shared them until I started to write. I was aware of so much that surrounded me but I did not have the words for these things. Writing helped me later in life as well. I also wanted to grow up be a very successful business woman one day, which is why I majored in finance, but later realized that did not fulfill my soul. It was a career that happened without inspiration or passion.
Anything additional you want to share with the readers?
Writing the truth takes courage and bravery. It is hard and allows for deep healing, and it is why people love to read. Indeed, the truth is stranger than fiction.