Catherine Eisner

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Biographical note:  Catherine Eisner’s fiction has appeared regularly in a number of UK literary journals, including Ambit and Mslexia. She is an Associate of the Royal College of Art; this, together with her interests in anthropology and design, reflects in her writings, which extend from a study of sex-attractant pheromones in literature, to researches into the little-known 19th Century shamanistic culture of the autonomous Russian republic of Mariy El.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844712991
ISBN:  9781844712991
Author:  Catherine Eisner
Title:  Sister Morphine
Series:  Salt Modern Fiction
Product class:  BB
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  FB
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  04-Jul-08
Extent:  496pp
Height:  234 mm
Width:  153 mm
Thickness:  39 mm
Weight:  744 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  NP
Price:  GBP 18.99
Price:  USD 36.95
Rights:  World

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Main description:  Masterful, darkly comic and unputdownably brilliant, this first novel by Catherine Eisner is an instant 21st-century classic. Sister Morphine tackles themes of suicidality, sibling murder, child abuse, morbid self-harm, guilt, jealousy, incest, drug addiction, infidelity, illegitimacy, obsessive compulsion, bereavement and a case of grand larceny in the second degree.

Eisner’s suite of women’s narratives is premised as confidential pages from the case notes of a Community Psychiatric Nurse (CPN), documenting neuroses and drug therapy interventions. These disturbing case histories, reconstituted as fictions by the CPN for reasons of legal privilege, explore the relationship between aberrant antisocial behaviour among women and the multifaceted, unpredictable side effects of psychoactive prescription drugs and their more bizarre manifestations as criminal behaviour.

Table of contents:
Soft Skin (Felicia F. – Alprazolam)
Mr & Mrs Camilla Revisited (Charlotte N. – Buspirone)
You Better Go Now (Zoe W. – Amitriptyline)
One Minute Apart (Elenore S. – Lorazepam)
Confessions of a Kissee (Eveline M. – Buproprion)
The Cheated Eye (Miriam R. – Fluvoxamine)
Cousin Ludwig’s Subtraction Game (Grete B. – Imipramine)
Honeymoon Without Maps (Esther G. – Thioridazine)
Elegy from a Locked Drawer (Marianne E. – Clonidine)
Red Coffee (Irina P. – Carbamazepine)
Dispossession (Mary H. – Desipramine)
A Stranger in Blood (Elspeth P. – Mirtazapine)
Thought Police (Theresa O. – Temazepam)
The Eleven Surviving Works of L v. K (Isolde B. – Diazepam)
Three Tiered Grave (Roberta J. – Clozapine)

Podcast

Extract from Dispossession

Mary ‘H’ (Desipramine), in her Lament of a Girl Led Astray, puts her piano proficiency to practical purpose.

‘For many years, I admit, yes, we’d conducted a sort of meretricious relationship, which had branded me, I suppose, as a species of ‘kept woman’, for there was a lighthearted understanding that we should assist each other financially from time to time, when low on funds.

Hence, when Douglas stole from the warmth of my bed in the small hours, I would often run to the piano to vocalize my penniless state in a patter song of my own devising . . .

Lament of a Girl Led Astray

Put a tenner on the table as yer leavin’,
Put a tenner on the table, won’tcha, dear.
Put a tenner on the table if yer love me,
’Cos a girl ’as gotta live . . .
’cos a girl ’as gotta live . . .
’Cos a girl ’as gotta live on more than
Cold and bitter beer.

The mock pathos and jangling honky-tonk beerhall accompaniment had generally been productive of more than a tenner.

This Score and Recorded Music is released with the agreement of the composers under a tripartite copyright © Grace Jardine-Wilkinson / Mark Bannister / Catherine Isolde Eisner

Play Manor Park Rap (1.8 MB)

Extract from Honeymoon Without Maps

By contrast, Esther ‘G’ (Thioridazine) transmutes a violent recriminatory episode from her abusive marriage into her choreographing of a tragi-comic dance sequence, Fugue for Two Misfits.

We were struggling in the dark and Howard's eyes were staring like the dead. The radio was broadcasting a rainswept state funeral, and I was consumed by the dismal sounds of muffled drums and the rumble of a gun carriage.

And as we fought, in ponderous slow-motion to the grave measure of that dead march, all the while the falling rain laid a soundtrack of background static … a dirge-like ‘music prompt’, you might say, to propel the dancers in a masque for a defunct marriage.

My hair, which had been pinned up for my performance, was loosed, as he threw me like a flying turkey on to the couch …

… If you are a ballet aficionado, then you'll know that my Fugue, like its musical counterpart, is a contrapuntal development between a male and a female dancer, with a short, repetitive, irritating theme. Insistent and incessant, the dance climaxes like a barber's pole and ends as it begins, da capo.

Fugue for Two Misfits

Extract from the ballet, Fugue for Two Misfits, composed by Peter Frost, under his copyright. For details of Peter's progressive rock-jazz-funk instrumentals on CD visit (link bar to http://cdbaby.com/cd/peterfrost)

Play Fugue for Two Misfits (3.4 MB)

View excerpt as PDF:

Click here to view a sample (160 KB)

Excerpt from book:  

One Minute Apart
(Elenore S. – Lorazepam)

Assessment Summary (extract): Despite initially accepting the need for supportive counselling to address her anxieties, the patient has paradoxically attempted to avoid treatment during the recent crises, and, after her major loss, is increasingly preoccupied with suicidal ideations, at which times she refuses to make the emergency call. At these times the patient, by rejecting appropriate increased levels of care and emergency interventions, remains acutely agitated and overwhelmed by self-destructive thoughts. The patient appears to be unconsciously seeking to avoid taking responsibility for symptom management or life changes and, until these issues are better clarified, a state of almost continual crisis is predicted.

Patient ID: CPN0268191058: Elenore S.
Occupation: Geopolitical cartographer
Drug: Lorazepam
Drug Class: Benzodiazepine anti-anxiety sedative
Common side effects: Confusion. Changes in vision. Memory disturbance. May impair judgement.

I am a mad woman. This is a story of vanity and foolishness yet I am not so mad as to name those who have made a fool out of me.

The beginning was innocent enough. ‘Pen Pal’s Plea’, I read in the letters column of our local newspaper. ‘Schoolgirl, 18 years, seeks friendship with similar through exchange of letters. Will you be my pen pal?’ The letter was signed C. Beauclaire; the address was a P.O. Box number in a small town in West Africa.

But what prompted me to clip out the item and fold it into my purse? It was an involuntary act, I rationalised to myself long afterwards; I had been powerless to repress such a capricious impulse, I reasoned, as I reflected on those first desperate lonely months of abandonment which had followed the death of my much loved partner, Christina. She had first won my devotion at university, when she had dwelt in the rarefied air of her final year and I, a fresher, had worshipped her from afar, unnoticed, on the outer fringes of her coterie. Then, years later, both working on our doctorates, we had rediscovered each other and our long enraptured journeying together had begun, our intimate desires so intuitively attuned that I believed, rightly, that such rare tendresses could be ended only by my perfect lover’s death or the death of love itself.

The case being the former, and, at that time, madly inconsolable, I had been prescribed, absurdly, over 5 mg of Lorazapam daily (for hyperanxiety; I was sleeping alone at night as the sole occupant of a house for the first time in my adult life), and thus I had entered that long dark vale of misrule, where my waywardness and the erratic querulousness of my grief had ultimately estranged me from most of our friends; indeed – I admit- eventually, even by my favourite niece was I shunned.

So, that evening, when I smoothed flat the folded press clipping on the table-top, I believe I can truthfully swear there was no sinister intent in my opening my writing case and reaching for my pen. I thought, merely, selfishly, with my drug-induced twisted logic of the newly bereft: ‘Why not make amends for all those lost lonely youthful years before I met Christina?’

Previous review quote:  Not only does [she] use straightforward suspense … but gives us, as a painter does, areas of intriguing shadow for us to wonder over … a genuinely unsettling voice, at once comic, intelligent and slightly, scarily deranged … a true technical triumph.

Kate Clanchy
Mslexia

Previous review quote:  Erotic … enthralling … very pictorial … very original.

Neville Marten
Ink