Writer explores parenting culture in first novel

 

ENGLISH lessons at Lockerbie Academy are now coming in useful for a debut novelist.

Eirinie Carson, who grew up in Dumfriesshire but now lives in California, has just released her first novel, Bloodfire, Baby, described as ‘a maternal gothic tale of new motherhood and the torment of a centuries-old haunting’.

And she’s excited to be back in Scotland promoting the book.

She says of it: “It is a post partum story about a woman left alone with her three-week old baby, who begins to see things in her house. In between this ubiquitous post partum tale is the story of her matriarchal lineage going back to 1800s Jamaica.”

Reflecting on her writing journey, Eirinie said it’s always been a passion and she loved English classes at Lockerbie Academy: “English was where I shined. I don’t think I ever really let myself believe I could be an author, though. I thought that was for other people.

“Mrs Bartlett was my English teacher and I like to think I was her favourite!”

However, after school she became a model and didn’t initially put pen to paper until tragedy hit in her 20s. Then, she wrote award-winning bereavement memoir The Dead Are Gods following the shock death of her best friend Larissa in 2018.

Explaining the move into fiction, Eirinie said: “Bloodfire, Baby” was a book born from the birth of my second child, Selah. I’m not sure if it was the “right” time or not, but the book decided it was ready. It began with notes written in the darkness of Selah’s nursery as she screamed.

“I was trying to put words to a feeling I couldn’t yet describe - the sense of leaving myself, the person I once knew so well, and becoming this other thing. A selfless, tired, never-ending caregiver without a coherent thought in my head. I wanted to get back to my old self, and didn’t know how to do it.

“Writing has, for me, always been archaeology. It’s a means to understand myself, and where I came from and also understand something deeper about the culture of parenting in our society.”

It took three years to write, ‘in fragments’, and inspiration came from many places.

She added: “When we decide to become parents something happens. “I’ll do it completely differently to my parents” we might think, but then inevitably, we find ourselves mimicking them.

“I was struck by the notion that the things we inherit from our parents cannot be ignored, even though we might want to ignore them. Ancestral lineage carries the good and the bad, and to confront that truth is to parent from a stable footing.”