Authors Kirstin Innes and Sam Baker next up at WIJ Scotland’s Book Salon
By Anna Burnside
What do Kirstin Innes’s acclaimed novel Scabby Queen and Sam Baker’s menopause memoir/manifesto The Shift have in common? They are the next two books up for discussion at WIJ Scotland’s Book Salon.
I interviewed Sam in the summer and persuaded her to climb Calton Hill and be photographed beside a giant gun. She has had an extraordinary career, editing More and Just 17 then Cosmopolitan and Red. In her 40s, in the middle of an early perimenopausal meltdown, she applied for another prestigious editor’s job.
After an extensive interview process, her male boss told her that it was not a suitable position for a girl who went to a comprehensive school and whose father was a bricklayer.
When Sam told me this, in Edinburgh’s Valvona & Crolla, I just about choked on my coffee.
The Shift unpicks what she did next: starting the online platform The Pool with Lauren Laverne, going to meetings with venture capitalists in the throes of menopausal sweats and brain fog. Then, when it had to close, she explains how she picked herself up, moved to Edinburgh and started again.
Acknowledging that the menopause affects everyone differently, she brings in the different experiences of a range of women who talk about their menopause and its effect on careers and relationships.
The Shift is now out in paperback and has spawned a successful podcast.
So plenty to talk about there. And that’s without touching on Sam’s five novels.
Kirstin Innes’s second novel, Scabby Queen, is also just out in paperback. It was one of the hits of 2020, helping people escape lockdown by living vicariously through heroine Clio Campbell.
We first meet her as a corpse - the book opens with her suicide. Through the eyes of others in her life we piece together the events that brought her there: an anti-poll tax hit single, an experimental Burns album, relationships with an important music promoter and a young grime artist plus a brush with an undercover police officer in a squat in Brixton.
Kirstin had the idea for Scabby Queen when she was pregnant with her first baby. She wrote it in between naps and feeds, found herself unexpectedly pregnant again and finally pressed send a week before her due date.
It was, she told me, “a 10lb baby of a book”.
There’s so much to talk about: where the idea came from, why she decided to tell the story without including Clio’s point of view, the way she wove so many of her own experiences into the book without making it autobiographical.
Then there are the practicalities: the tag team childcare with her partner, the fingerless gloves for writing in the freezing cold, the barricade against the door to give her peace to write.
And, once it was published, how it feels to be on the First Minister’s TBR pile.
WIJ Scotland’s Book Salon is a great way to hear authors like Sam and Kirstin talking about their work. The first half of the session is a Q&A with me, with the chat box open for questions from the audience. Then it’s over to you to quiz the writer about their process, their agent, their next project …
I can’t promise any more coffee-spluttering revelations but it would be lovely to see lots of you there. These will be two great nights.
To book tickets for WIJ Scotland’s Book Salon with Sam Baker on Tues 25th May click here and for Kirstin Innes on Tues 6th July click here.
Anna Burnside is a feature writer at the Daily Record. She has worked at Scotland on Sunday, the Sunday Herald and the Sunday Times. She used to run a book salon with guest authors in her living room. At the moment WIJ Scotland’s Book Salon events are held on Zoom.