This is a Times Online excerpt of an interview with Helen Oyeyemi, the writer of Icarus Girl.
Here, she talks about her new book, White is for Witching. I am... confused.
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Oyeyemi neatly summarises White is for Witching as the story of a “starving girl and a xenophobic house”. In it, Miranda Silver, her twin brother, Eliot, and their French father run a large guesthouse in Dover, the building itself a sentient if deranged soul. Miranda suffers from pica, a condition that compels her to eat only chalk. It worsens after the killing of her photographer mother in Haiti and she goes into psychiatric care. (“Female craziness is something I’m very interested in,” Oyeyemi says, “how it can manifest itself, what it means, what pressures force someone into these behaviours. I’m pretty much obsessed with madness.”) Several voices recount the ensuing events: Miranda gets into Cambridge. She falls in love with a black girl. She vanishes.
“I wanted to write a vampire story,” Oyeyemi explains. “After I graduated, I volunteered in South Africa for a few months. I was staying in this town called Paarl, and everyone wanted to talk about race all the time. I started to feel strange . . . I got this flu-like illness and spent a lot of time in bed with Dracula in the dark wing of this big house. I was feverish. I started thinking that vampire stories were a lot to do with the fear of the outsider, because you’ve got this foreign count with this unnatural appetite,” she says, building momentum. “I thought, what’s an unnatural appetite? A girl who eats chalk, but probably with a desire to eat something else.” The result is not a conventional vampire story; there are no fangs, bats or archvillains.
