Erica Eisdorfer Shares Her Book, The Wet Nurse’s Tale
On UNC-TV’s North Carolina Bookwatch,
Sunday, November 15, at 5 PM

Susan Rose isn’t your average protagonist: she’s scheming, promiscuous, plump, and she is also smart, funny, tender, and entirely lovable. Like many lower-class women of Victorian England, she was born into a world that offered very few opportunities for the poor and unlovely. But Susan is the kind of plucky heroine who seeks her fortune, and finds it . . . with some help from, well, her breasts. Susan, you see, is a professional wet nurse; she breast-feeds the children of wealthy women who can’t or won’t nurse their own babies.

But when her own child is sold by her father and sent to a London lady who had recently lost a baby, Susan manages to convince his new foster mother, Mrs. Norbert, to hire her as a wet nurse. Once reunited with her son, Susan discovers the Norbert home to be a much more sinister place than she’d ever expected. Dark and full of secrets, its master is in India, and the first baby who died there did so under very mysterious circumstances. Susan embarks on a terrifying journey to rescue her son before he meets the same fate.

In an all-new episode of UNC-TV’s local literary series North Carolina Bookwatch with D.G. Martin, premiering Sunday, November 8, at 5 PM, Erica Eisdorfer shares her debut The Wet Nurse’s Tale, featuring this sharp-tongued, adventurous heroine who offers a candid and often funny look at the business of nursing babies in Victorian England.

Erica Eisdorfer, born in Durham, North Carolina, was the first of the three children born to her parents, who had moved down south from the great city of New York and lived for some years in culture shock. The family rented a wonderful house edged by forest and she and her two younger brothers spent a great deal of time playing in the trees where she, due to her birth order and general bossiness, was constantly the admiral of the ship, the mayor of the town, the principal of the school. This sort of innocent play lasted only until her brothers, in what must have been a co-epiphany, realized that they didn’t have to take it anymore and went off by themselves to play with their trucks, leaving her alone forever. This is when she discovered reading.

After graduating from Duke University, she considered, then rejected, the idea of further schooling and went to work at the Bull’s Head Bookshop, where she has found gainful employment for the last thirty years as buyer and manager.

Don’t miss D.G. Martin’s all-new interview with Erica Eisdorfer on North Carolina Bookwatch, Sunday, November 15, at 5 PM, only on UNC-TV!

During the 26-week season of North Carolina Bookwatch, guests will also include:  John Shelton Reed and Dale Volberg Reed (Holy Smoke), Justin Catanoso (My Cousin the Saint), Todd Johnson (The Sweet By and By), Michael Walden (North Carolina in the Connected Age), Barbara Fredrickson (Positivity), Michael Davis (Street Gang), Dan Ariely (Predictably Irrational), Howard Lee (The Courage to Lead), Marianne Gingher (Adventures in Pen Land), Dan Barefoot (Hark the Sound of Tar Heel Voices), John Hart (The Last Child),  Elizabeth Edwards (Resilience), Brett Friedlander (Chasing Moonlight),  Michael Malone (The Four Corners of the Sky), John Kessel (The Baum Plan for Financial Independence and Other Stories), Reynolds Price (Ardent Spirits), Alexandra Sokoloff (The Unseen), and Barry Popkin (The World is Fat).

For additional information about series guests and airdates, plus links to Bookwatch on Facebook, please visit: www.unctv.org/ncbookwatch.

Funding for North Carolina Bookwatch is provided by UNC-TV members and by Quail Ridge Books and Music, Raleigh’s independent, full service bookstore, bringing readers and writers together since 1984.

North Carolina Bookwatch is part of UNC-TV’s ongoing commitment to produce programs for and about North Carolina. UNC-TV is the statewide 11-station broadcast network of the University of North Carolina. For more information, please visit www.unctv.org/ncbookwatch.

For more information about North Carolina Bookwatch and UNC-TV’s other original productions, please visit our website at www.unctv.org.