Musings For The Memoir

After writing and publishing two novels, one set during WW11, and another in the 1970’s, a tale of a lonely suburban housewife in New Jersey, Sande Boritz Berger is ready to tackle her memoir and share her own emotional journey.

Baby GirlI was a war baby, the first child and only girl. In the years when I could finally understand, my mother never missed a chance to tell me how she had suffered through two miscarriages before me. I understood that I was her third, and lucky try, yet if not for the difficulties during those previous pregnancies, I would have never arrived. The thought of that, the possibility of never existing, was unimaginable to me and more than a bit shocking. 

How could my entire existence be so precarious? Instead of a girl, with big hazel eyes, and chubby pink thighs, I might have been just another egg, sloughed off with the dozens of others that came before me. Oh, and the other story she often told was that I was born with the umbilical cord wrapped tightly around my neck, and that I nearly died. Though her tales often fascinated me, I was aware of my mother’s matter-of-fact approach in the telling. I think what I’d wished to hear was how very happy she finally became, or that something miraculous changed her life for the better, that the something was me, a healthy child and daughter. I so needed to know that my birth and entry into the world was not paired with just memories of remorse and regret. 

Fifteen months later, with the war over and my father safely returned from his stint in the Navy, my mother gave birth, with no complications, to another child. This time to a boy. Since we lived across the street from my grandmother’s house in Brooklyn, there were always surrogates to help with babies, including two unmarried aunts far from their homeland in Vilna, and intent on earning their keep. Since teenagers, both had lived in their brother’s house.

In most baby pictures of me, which are only a few, I appear owl-eyed and cautious, more than a bit worried. Told again and again that I was a terrible sleeper, I was tossed around a lot, passed from body to body, scent to scent. Was I searching for her, my mother? A lifetime later, I am still so restless. 

(excerpt)

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After nearly two decades as a scriptwriter and video producer for Fortune 500 companies, Sande Boritz Berger returned to her first passion: writing fiction and nonfiction full time. She completed an MFA in Writing and Literature at Stony Brook University where she was awarded The Deborah Hecht Memorial prize for fiction.

Essays and short stories have appeared in over 20 anthologies including Aunties: “Thirty-Five Writers Celebrate Their Other Mother” by Ballantine, and “Ophelia’s Mom” by Crown. Her novel, The Sweetness, was a semi-finalist in Amazon’s yearly Breakthrough Novel Awards. Sande lives in Manhattan with her husband and has two daughters

Find out more about Sande on her website https://www.sandeboritzberger.com/

Follow her on Twitter https://twitter.com/EZWriter25

SPLIT-LEVEL, Sande Boritz Berger

In Split-Level, set as the nation recoils from Nixon, Alex Pearl is about to commit the first major transgression of her life. But why shouldn’t she remain an officially contented, soon-to-turn-thirty wife? She’s got a lovely home in an upscale Jersey suburb, two precocious daughters, and a charming husband, Donny. But Alex can no longer deny she craves more―some infusion of passion into the cul-de-sac world she inhabits.

After she receives a phone call from her babysitter’s mother reporting that Donny took the teen for a midnight ride, promising he’d teach her how to drive, Alex insists they attend Marriage Mountain, the quintessential 1970s “healing couples sanctuary.” Donny accedes―but soon becomes obsessed with the manifesto A Different Proposition and its vision of how multiple couples can live together in spouse-swapping bliss.

At first Alex scoffs, but soon she gives Donny much more than he bargained for. After he targets the perfect couple to collude in his fantasy, Alex discovers her desire for love escalating to new heights―along with a willingness to risk everything. Split-Level evokes a pivotal moment in the story of American matrimony, a time when it seemed as if an open marriage might open hearts as well.

“How impressive Split-Level is: wonderfully rich with details, fluent and fluid, with an inevitable-yet-unexpected ending, inspired throughout is its portrait of a woman whose essential life is an unconscious double-ness/split-ness.”
―Joyce Carol Oates, author of We Were the Mulvaneys and Blonde

“Sande Boritz Berger sets a 1970s Jersey housewife on a provocative collision course in Split-Level, a sharp portrait of female empowerment. Through sensitive insights, a woman finds an honest version of herself after realizing that her ideas on the nuclear family have made her erase vital parts of her identity.”
―Foreword Reviews

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