Q&A - The Last Sin Eater

What made you come up with the idea of a sin eater? It says in the beginning of the book that this is a real concept brought by immigrants to the Appalachian mountains. How did you discover this?

I once saw a movie about a doctor in Appalachia, and the story had a sin eater in it. I got interested in finding out what a sin eater was. I learned, mostly through research on the Internet, that the sin eater was a person who was paid a small fee or given food to take upon himself the sins of the deceased.

Often the sin eaters were tricked into it. Some wealthy person would invite them in, serve them a meal and say, “By the way, you just ate the sins of our dead relative in the next room.” Then they were locked into that life as an outcast.

Sin eating was practiced in England, the lowlands of Scotland, and the Welsh border district in the early nineteenth century, and carried over by immigrants into the remote areas of the Appalachian Mountains.

As I learned about the sin eater, questions started forming in my mind. Why would someone agree to do something like that, that made him a pariah in the community?

The whole idea of a sin eater fascinated me. It's like Christ in a way, yet it isn't. To me it was a twisted gospel. The sin eater might think he was being a living sacrifice, giving up his life for his neighbors by taking their sins on himself, but in actuality, he was standing in the way of the true gospel because he's not perfect and he can't remove sin. So I used this as a vehicle to portray the gospel message.

Did you face any particular creative challenges with this book? It seems different from most of your other ones—for instance, it's the only one that is told in the first person.

Yes, there were.

First, there was the challenge of thinking from a child's point of view. I like the power that first person can have when told from a child's perspective in stories like To Kill a Mockingbird. A child can be plagued by guilt in a unique way yet also be open to spiritual truth and see things that adults perhaps are no longer open to seeing or believing.

Another challenge was how to capture the dialect of the Appalachian people without losing the reader. Only recently did I read a book on writing by Sol Stein and learned it was best not to use dialect. That would have made it easier write, and perhaps easier for the reader as well!

Another thing about The Last Sin Eater is that I didn't know myself what terrible thing Cadi has done to make her feel so guilty. Nor did I know at first what terrible things the others in the story were trying to hide. It was only as the story unfolded that things became clear to me, just as they do for the reader.

< Back to The Last Sin Eater