Carrion Crow

"Carrion Crow is a fascinating book. I believe it’s inspired by a real-life story of a woman in France who was imprisoned by her own family for twenty-five years in an attic. It’s about a girl called Marguerite who is going to be married, but before she is married off, her mother tells her she is to be prepared for wifehood and confines her to an attic for her well-being. In this attic is a book, Mrs. Beaton’s Book of Household Management , and a sewing machine. She finds a carrion crow that has been making a nest in the walls. We understand that she’s going mad, that she’s being starved and neglected, and she may or may not be imagining this carrion crow… It’s not a book that sets things up very easily. It’s really about what we learn regarding Marguerite’s mother and why Marguerite is being imprisoned. There’s so much beautiful writing – it’s hard to describe the plot or to do justice to this book, because we essentially have a woman going mad locked in a room – but it’s beautiful, and a gorgeous metaphor for the Victorian restraints on women. She suffers in ways that are unimaginable at the hands of her own mother, but there are social reasons for that. It’s gloriously gothic, and the crow symbolizes so much. It seems to be such a natural instinct when real life is horrible. Trauma resists language and resists storytelling. We have to reach deeper into horror, which I think is actually a very useful tool when it comes to exploring trauma in terms of metaphor. Carrion Crow is one of those books where for the madness that she experiences, realism would not do it justice. We have to venture into fantasy and into surrealism in order to appreciate the destruction of her mind."