Sirens | A Southern True Crime Podcast · The Sirens Network

Southern Noir Book Club | Sagit Schwartz - Since She's Been Gone

·54 min·3 clips

The book starts with a woman saying Beatrice’s mother is alive and she has a limited time to prove it.

1. Sirens | A Southern True Crime Podcast uses this conversation to discuss Sagit Schwartz’s novel Since She’s Been Gone and the writing choices behind it. 2. Sagit Schwartz is a licensed psychotherapist, former clinical psychologist, and full-time novelist, which matters because she brings clinical experience and literary practice to the book. 3. The episode asks what happens when a psychologist in recovery learns that the mother she buried 26 years earlier may still be alive. 4. Schwartz says she practiced for close to a decade and later shifted from television writing to novels during the pandemic. 5. Her clinical work included adult children of child abuse survivors, trauma cases, and many patients with eating disorders. 6. Schwartz says the scarcity of eating-disorder representation in adult contemporary fiction pushed her to write the novel. 7. She describes books as “windows” for empathy and “mirrors” for readers who recognize their own shame and isolation. 8. Since She’s Been Gone follows Beatrice across the United States as she tries to piece together what happened to her mother. 9. The first pages introduce a woman who shows up with the bracelet Beatrice’s mother wore, which the police had said was stolen after the hit-and-run. 10. Schwartz says the story also moves back to Beatrice at 15 in residential treatment, where the eating disorder and grief are both present. 11. She says the book began as present-day chapters only, then became dual timeline after she realized the past needed to be shown directly. 12. Schwartz describes that rewrite as a lesson in not being fixed on a single plan for structure. 13. She says the publisher’s sales department later liked the dual timeline because that format sells well. 14. Schwartz links the book’s representation goals to reader responses from people who felt less alone after reading it. 15. She says 9% of the population deals with eating disorders, a figure she uses to argue the issue is still underrepresented. 16. Schwartz says the book avoids glamorizing the disorder and instead treats it as life-threatening and serious. 17. The conversation is informal and conversational, with the hosts reacting to specific plot details, memoir-like influences, and craft decisions in real time. 18. The pacing is lively and cross-talk heavy, with frequent detours into therapy, dual timelines, and the publishing process. 19. Readers interested in grief, trauma, eating disorders, and craft. 20. Listeners wanting a tightly focused spoiler-heavy plot recap.

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