Title: The Housekeeper’s Secret
Author: Sandra Schnakenburg
Publisher: She Writes Press
Pages: 290
My GoodReads Rating:⭐⭐⭐
At first the book
reminded me of The Help by Kathryn Stockett, where a young white woman, Skeeter
Phelan, interviews black women, such as Aibileen, Minny and ten others, who
work as maids for white families, and writes down their true stories in a book
later published as The Help. As I read on, I realized that the similarity, a
member of the family writing about the person who worked for them, was the only
similarity. Lee Metoyer, who works as a housekeeper to the Krilich family, is
white and this is a different time and a different part of the US.
In 1965, Lee
joined the Krilich family as a housekeeper. When she joined, Lilian, the
author’s mother, had only one instruction for her children, five girls Roseann,
Debbie, Robin, Barb, Sandra, and a boy, Rob. They were not to ask Lee any
personal questions about her family or her past.
Lee remained part
of the household until 1994, becoming a friend to Lilian, and a second mother
to the children.
In 1994, Lee
tells Sandra to write a book on her, the book she herself often said she’d
write someday but wasn’t able to. Sandra makes a solemn promise to Lee and
decides to start interviewing Lee and getting to know her story the very next
day. Unfortunately, Lee passes away that night.
In the absence of
the primary source, Sandra is unable to follow through with her promise, and it
is only decades later that she is able to piece Lee’s story together by
interviewing others and through research.
The
Housekeeper’s Secret is the book that Sandra promised to write. While Lee’s
secret is compelling enough, the book falls short as it ends up being about so
many things other than Lee.
We learn that
Sandra’s father was unreasonable and autocratic, planning a family vacation to
Disneyland at just 30 minutes’ notice, another trip to Puerto Rico at just 4
days’ notice and bringing back three baby crocodiles as pets. I was amazed to
read about the expanse and luxury of the author’s childhood home, with its
laundry chutes, among other things.
The story is
written in four parts, divided into Summer, Fall, Winter and Spring. When
Summer begins, the children are all young. When the Fall section begins, the
timeline has moved ahead by seven years. Lilian gets to know of her husband’s
infidelity (he has a second family) and decides to ask for a divorce. But then
Sandra, in middle school, meets with a bicycle accident, and suffers traumatic brain
injury. She has to relearn to speak, read and write, and rebuild her life
from scratch. This section ends when Sandra turns 23, when she goes to college
and earns a degree without her father’s financial or emotional support. This is
when her parents finally get divorced. The family home is sold, and Lee and
Lilian move to a smaller home.
By the time the
Winter section starts, 59 percent of the book is over. By now, Sandra is
married, and has a job, and she gets busy with her family. She forgets the
promise she made to Lee. It is only after her mother’s death in 2008 that the siblings find an urn containing Lee’s ashes in the house, sparking Sandra’s journey
anew. This is the 64 percent mark.
The secret is
finally revealed at the 74 percent mark. At this point, the prose becomes
mellow, more emotional.
I couldn’t
sympathise as much as I wanted to with Lee’s past. I felt emotionally distant from her story.
Lee must have
extraordinary resilience, I can imagine, but there should have been more
commentary about it. The story would have worked better if it had been all
about Lee, whether as fiction or non-fiction. As it was, so much of the story
was about Sandra’s childhood and family, her college, her husband etc, with a
mere 36 percent devoted to the promise in the title.
Of course, it’s
not the author’s fault. Lee never revealed her secret herself. Had she done so,
we would have learned about how she renewed herself, how she learned to tamp
down the parts that brought her pain.
All the questions
that Sandy has about Lee, how she is the only one who knows how to help
traumatic brain injury, how she lost her teeth and needs dentures, how she
knows how to deal with abusive men, her strange walk, her dread of bathtubs,
her craze for baseball, are all answered through conjecture.
I have one minor
quibble too. Frustrated by an inability to get any answers on the Internet,
Sandra’s search gets a boost when a friend, Vickie, gives her valuable
information about Lee’s siblings, down to their ages and dates of birth. The
author never reveals how Vickie came by this information.
The ending was
nice with the Krilich siblings getting a chance to meet Lee's children.
(I read this book on NetGalley. Thank you to the author, the
publisher and NetGalley.)
