Monique Berish debuted as an author this spring with More: A Memoir. It depicts her raw and gritty journey toward finding peace and redemption.
As a child, I made sense of the world through a lens painted with the paranoid and delusional alternate reality of my father’s schizophrenia. Trust no one, he taught me; people only want to hurt you. The lesson he unwittingly taught me best was how to feel nothing. My mother’s detached presence did little to assuage my need for love and connection. At times my father, in one of his delusional rants, would become belligerent and abusive. The worse he became the more she retreated into her aloof and reserved habits. Eventually, the marriage ended in divorce. After the tragic death of her third husband, my mother’s need for male affection to fill the hole where there should have been happiness, led us across the country to a trailer park in Roswell, New Mexico. When her abusive boyfriend, and soon-to-be husband, turned his violence toward me, I left. I was fourteen and on my own.
With no stable place to live, I bounced from boyfriends to friends and home again. Desperate for an opportunity to escape my circumstances, I launched myself into adulthood by eloping with a private in the Army and began a series of adventures that would take me from the deserts of New Mexico up to the vast tundra of Alaska and everywhere in between. Lacking any moral compass, I found decoys of joy in meaningless sexual relationships, drugs, and alcohol as I floated on the breeze of circumstance. My self-destructive behaviors planted me in increasingly perilous situations until finally, I was forced to face my mistakes and their heart-wrenching consequences.
Eventually, my dandelion-seed life landed me in Phoenix, Arizona where I found the nourishment of love and peace I’d spent my life searching for. During my darkest hour, with no one and nowhere to turn, I discovered that I had a Savior to mourn with me and send me peace. With the encouragement of a friend, a spiritual awakening helped me see who I really am. Armed with the knowledge of my worth, I was able to grow beyond the limits of my upbringing and finally became MORE.
In 2017 I sat next to an old friend in a memoir class at a writers’ conference. I had zero interest in writing a memoir. I was only there as moral support for my friend. Memoir was his gig. However, over the years, he’d seen many of my Facebook posts about my life, and as the class progressed he kept elbowing me.
“You need to write your book!”
That elbow set me on a three-year-long journey to publishing More: A Memoir.
I had no idea when I started this project how life-changing it would be. The process of opening a tightly sealed box of memories I had sitting on a dusty shelf in my brain was painful, healing, and liberating. Prior to writing this book, if you would have asked me about the scars I’d amassed through life, I would have told you they were well-healed. I didn’t realize picking up each one of those memories, dusting them off, and holding them up for the world to see was going to aggravate some of those wounds. Writing the memoir gave me no choice but to examine my past, accept it, and move forward in faith. It was raw, it was real, and it was finished. Now what?
At first, I attempted to get the interest of publishers at writers’ conferences. But in the publishing world I was immediately excluded from Christian publishers because I wrote a Latter-day Saint conversion story. Add the religious themes of the book and every major publisher in New York and elsewhere were also out. That left me with LDS publishers. And they were interested! But my book had sexual situations, abuse, addiction, and even some scattered foul language. Their initial acclamations turned into a quandary of how to edit it to “fit the mold.” In the end they returned it to me, unpublished, and I again found myself asking, now what?
Enter my old friend, Brad McBride.
Brad had his own impressive resume of writing accomplishments and experience as a self-published author. He’d watched over the years as writing friends had tried and failed to publish books that didn’t fit the LDS publishing mold. These books, although inspirational, contained content that was too edgy or otherwise unsuitable for the LDS market. Additionally, there had recently been a number of very successful memoirs published that celebrated leaving the church. Brad wanted a book that celebrated finding the church. The rejection of my book by LDS publishing was the straw that broke the camel’s back and he decided to do something about it. Pulling from his own experience, he created Addept Media, a small boutique publishing company. He hopes to fill part of the void that LDS publishers inevitably leave. More: A Memoir is Addept Media’s first publication.
I am so excited to finally have a home for this book that impacted my life so deeply, and to hold it in my hands. I am humbled and grateful for the opportunity to bring my story into the world. I wrote about everything: the abuse, the mistakes, the ugliness. My conversion, my healing and my redemption. All of it.
Monique Berish is a Board Certified Psychiatric Nurse with more than 20 years experience. From the rough streets of Perth Amboy, New Jersey, to the wilds of Alaska, Monique wandered through much of the United States gleaning experience from her adventures along the way. Raised by a schizophrenic father and a clinically depressed mother, she forged her way into healing and kindled a passion for caring for the mentally ill along the way. In addition to memoir, she writes articles on various mental health topics, consults as a psychiatric and mental health expert for publications, and publishes humor-based short stories.
Her memoir can be purchased at her website; MoniqueBerish.com or in e-book format at: https://www.amazon.com/author/moniqueberish