Books: Erin Summers Norman

Entitled The Lemay Leveller, the books gets its title from Lemay, the name of the area in St Louis where Erin was living in while homeless.

“And as the book progresses,” she continues, “the point becomes clear that I am using this exercise of writing to be a leveller. To make things level that were devastatingly unbalanced and unequal.”

Erin has been living in England for the last 15 years, and in Colchester for the last seven years.

And although her book does cover some of her time over here, it is predominantly about growing up in St Louis, Missouri.

“The book is basically my journey from there to here,” Erin tells me. “I always intended to write a book on how I grew up in the extraordinary way that I did, but as a way of achieving some kind of justice.”

For the early part of her life, Erin lived an almost idylic childhood on her grandparents farm after her parents got divorced.

“When I was ten I when I went back to live with my mother and it was a crushing blow,” she reveals. “She was completely unstable and by the time I was 14 she had completely gone off the rails.”

Forced to leave home, Erin first went to live with her boyfriend but then after he was put into a youth hospital, she spent the next few years on the streets.

“I was homeless from the age of 15 up until 22,” Erin says. “Often I had a sofa to sleep on, somewhere, but there were times when I was forced to sleep under bridges.

”The writing started after I was put into a detention centre for three weeks. When I came out I was so angry with the world and what was happening to me I decided to write it down. In that way I would be holding them to account.”

Filling up her notebook when she could, those early entries are the backbone of the Lemay Leveller.

Fortunately for Erin there was a happy ending to her story.

She met her English husband in 2000 and got married soon after in his home town of Southend.

Erin then got a job working as a receptionist at Crittall Windows in Braintree and started writing on-line blogs for the Independent.

“I did one on humanitarianism,” she adds, “and then Bertrand Russell before I got ill with neurological condition, which meant I had to give up work.”

But even that condition kind of ended up being a good thing as it meant Erin could devote more time to completing her book.

“I’m really proud of it,” she smiles. “It definitely does the job it’s meant to. When I re-read some of the old stuff I had forgotten a lot of what I had written so it was pretty tough going but well worth it in the end.”

• The Lemay Leveller is now available from Red Lion Books, High Street, Colchester, priced £15.