Ready for Love with Nikki Leigh Love Coach
Sinner's Guide to Confession with Phyllis Schieber
November 13, 2020
This week’s show takes us back to a show that I recorded on my Book Promo 101 radio show in 2009 with my client and friend Phyllis Scheiber, where we talked about her novel, The Sinner’s Guide to Confession. In this book she discusses three women, their lives, their relationships with their families and with each other. It is an interesting study of relationships, self-care and how our backgrounds and histories impact our lives. It also shows how a strong support system and friends can help us deal with struggles in our lives. You will also learn some details about her writing process. I look forward to sharing this look back on a really good story I enjoyed and the interworkings on her characters’ relationships.
This show airs on Thursday November 12th, 2020 at 9 pm ET/6 pm PT

Listen on http://www.newvisionsradio.com

Or listen on the Tune In App on mobile devices on “New Visions Radio”.

About The Sinner’s Guide to Confession –

Barbara, Kaye, and Ellen, longtime friends, are inseparable but each nurtures her own secret. As a widowed mother, Barbara hides her persona as a writer of erotica. Kaye is having an extramarital affair that reawakens her passion but fills her with conflict. Ellen has lost her husband to a younger woman who is now pregnant a painful blow, since Ellen and her husband were never able to conceive. But she is not childless.

Ellen is still haunted by the memory of the baby girl she had at sixteen and was forced to relinquish at birth. Estranged from her family, Ellen realizes that if she is ever to find her lost daughter now a grown woman herself she will have to confront her shame and rely on her dearest friends.

About Phyllis Scheiber –

The first great irony of my life was that I was born in a Catholic hospital. My parents, survivors of the Holocaust, had settled in the South Bronx among other new immigrants. My mother was apparently so nervous she barely slept the entire time she was in the hospital, fearing her fair-skinned, blue-eyed newborn would be switched with another baby. When my paternal grandfather, an observant Jew, came to see his newest granddaughter in the hospital, he was so uncertain of how to behave around the kindly nuns that he tipped his yarmulke to them each time one passed. It was in this haze of paranoia and neuroses, as well as black humor, that the makings of a writer were initiated.

In the mid-fifties, my family moved to Washington Heights, an enclave for German Jews, known as ‘Frankfurt-on-the-Hudson.’ The area offered scenic views of the Hudson River and the Palisades, as well as access to Fort Tryon Park and the mysteries of the Cloisters. I graduated from George Washington High School. Among its famous graduates was Henry Kissinger, former US Secretary of State (my grandmother played cards with his mother at the YMWHA on Nagle Avenue).

I graduated from high school at sixteen, went on to Bronx Community College, transferred to and graduated from Herbert H. Lehman College with a B.A. in English and a New York State license to teach English. I earned my M.A. in Literature from New York University and later my M.S. as a developmental specialist from Yeshiva University. I have worked as a high school English teacher, a special education teacher, and as a learning disabilties specialist in several college programs.

Reading was the first line of defense against anything I did not want to do. ‘I’m reading,’ was an excuse my parents never challenged. Education was paramount in our home. There were weekly trips to the library, and the greatly anticipated Friday afternoon story hour. Everything about words seemed interesting and important.. I could make sense of the world if I put it on paper. I could even make the world better; people could become smarter and more attractive, and I could make people laugh and cry at will. Writng was powerful. I thought in stories, answered questions in my head and added, ‘she said’ at the end of a sentence. I still do.

My first novel, Strictly Personal, for young adults, was published by Fawcett-Juniper. Willing Spirits was published by William Morrow. My most recent novel, The Sinner’s Guide to Confession, will be published by Berkley Putnam on July 1, 2008. In March 2008, Berkley Putnam will issue the first paperback publication of Willing Spirits.

Phyllis Schieber lives in Westchester County, New York She works privately with students, teaching writing, and is currently working on a new novel.