I found Sin Eater a very physical novel, its centre the desiring, devouring, life-giving, murdering, and dying female body. A tiny act of rebellion within an unjust world. While the book doesn’t propose the radical transformation of a patriarchal society, what it does do-I hope-is chart a very tiny revolution in the way one woman views herself and her situation. In response to the question whether Sin Eater is a feminist work, Campisi stated, “It is definitely a feminist work-not because I set out specifically to write a feminist book, but because feminism is so deeply ingrained in me, I can’t write anything else. Although she loves her father and despises her mother’s family, she eventually understands that she has inherited their fierce fighting spirit. Intelligent and embattled, she learns early how cruel a woman’s existence is, and we are invited inside her heart and mind in order to witness how she devises a way to transform herself from child-victim into mistress of her destiny. In addition to being enraptured with the sin eater, I fell in love with Campisi’s heroine. All the other embellishments grew from this beginning.” Sin eating couldn’t remain an eccentric post-mortem ritual (as it was historically), but needed to transform into a deep, necessary communion between two people that was woven into the fabric of everyday society. But for the story I envisioned to work, I knew the world needed to be syncretic too, part historical, part fictional. Fascinated by the syncretism of Christian ritual and pagan, fascinated by the essential role played by a social pariah, fascinated by what you call wonderfully the “fleshly ritual” of it. So, when I encountered sin eating, I was fascinated.
While most kids were being read your typical bedtime stories, my dad was regaling my sisters and me with tales from the Iliad. In an eloquent reply, she told me, “To be honest, I am a history nerd. Thus, I could not wait to interview Megan Campisi in order to discover how she had happened upon the phenomenon of the sin eater. In the days that followed, I pondered the notion that Elizabethan England had replaced the Catholic custom of the priestly confessional with the fleshly ritual of a woman who imbibes and internalizes another person’s wrongs. Over time, she comes to understand that this position renders her powerful, and she sets out to uncover a deadly intrigue that has its centre at the heart of the Elizabethan court. Arrested for stealing, young May is condemned to attend the last minutes of the dying and to eat the foods that represent their crimes and transgressions. The plot of Sin Eater rests on a compelling premise. I have always been greedy for delicious writing and here it was, served up to me in generous helpings. Soon I became engrossed in this sumptuous Tudor banquet of a novel, savouring its charming, fairytale-like language and complex narrative. I became even more intrigued when I perused its beginning pages and discovered a handbook, outlining the foods a sin eater-always a woman-must devour in order to remove the evils a dying person brought into this world when he or she was alive. When the cover of Megan Campisi’s novel Sin Eater (Atria, April 2020) first flashed across my consciousness, the title convinced me: I simply had to read this book. A Tudor Banquet of a Novel: Sin Eater by Megan Campisi
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