AIDA Austin said she wanted to write her own story about what it was like for a couple with a young family to care for a child that has intractable epilepsy.

In doing just that, Aida has penned Seized – a book the guardians of children dealing with every kind of ailment, serious or benign, will want to read, and send her thanks.

‘We all store memories in different ways,’ Aida said, her eyes already turning glassy even though her daughter is no longer a two-year-old experiencing repetitive seizures, but a 30-year-old woman now living an independent life.

The pain reveals itself in different ways and Aida frequently auto-corrects herself, desperate to protect not just the privacy but the dignity of those whom she loves.

So, she starts at the end of her story. Smiling, she said Iona’s paediatric consultant has asked her permission to share a 1,000-word except from the book – an excerpt that has Aida witnessing Iona having multiple seizures.

It is that, and the sheer beauty of Aida’s writing style – a style that is every bit as powerful and lyrical as any of Ireland’s finest writers – that holds the reader in its grip.

The consultant is of the opinion that the book should be read by everyone working in her field as a paediatric epileptologist and that is what Aida finds ‘the most touching result of the book’.

It pleases her that it has the power to increase people’s understanding because ‘people are still scared by epilepsy’.

As a young woman, Aida qualified as a nurse but never practised. She says it turned out to be a saving grace because it prepared her somewhat for all of the hospital visits, her daughter’s brain surgery in London at the age of 18, and a vagal nerve stimulation procedure in 2023.

The cover of the book Seized.

Such is the power of this self-published book that it would have been snapped up by publishers the world over if the author had only labelled it ‘fiction.’

As it is, Aida has the backing of Marianne Gunn O’Connor, the most lauded literary agent in the land, because she recognises the writer’s talent and the powerful narrative in this inexplicably beautiful book.

‘It is a stream of consciousness, my internal experiences,’ said Aida, who wrote the first draft quickly, in a flurry at the start of the COVID lockdown.

Wisely, and with her agent’s guidance, Iona’s voice was introduced and what the reader gets to experience is an emotive scale, one-minute tipping this way, another tipping that.

Talking is the hard part for Aida who has only given a few interviews since her book was published at the beginning of December.

‘Writing it was difficult but liberating because it shifted my understanding of what coping meant,’ said Aida. ‘The process is messy. It is untidy, and it is definitely not surface emotions.’

The first print run of Seized is small with copies available directly from Aida’s Instagram page, or from Kerr’s Bookshop in Clonakilty, but that is likely to change in the near future because requests for interviews from RTÉ, and other media outlets, have already started to trickle in.

Aida’s talent as a writer will be familiar to those who followed her column in The Irish Independent and subsequently in The Irish Examiner.

The columns offered tantalising glimpses into the life of her extended family, but without the shade, and it was the humour contained within them that made them sparkle.

Aida credits her Irish dad, Gerald, with being a kind of loveable dictator who rationed television programmes to what was educational or interesting. He would also conduct pop quizzes about the books she was reading, most of which were the classics.’

‘We were allowed to watch programmes by David Attenborough, and programmes like Roots which traumatised me, and Brideshead Revisited, but not the saucy bits,’ she said.

Aida, or Maria Aida Austin to give her her full title, wasn’t the only person that her dad encouraged. With her, he would say she should write or paint landscapes for
a living.

Gerald identified talents in his other three daughters too and would refer to them individually as ‘my most beautiful first daughter, my most beautiful second daughter,’ and so on, so they all felt the love.

In later years, Aida studied English at university​, and was an art teacher on what she describes as ‘a peripatetic basis,’ as well as a rabid gardener with an old farmhouse, her husband Dave, and four children Joe, Finn, Molly and Iona, to look after.

In addition to her writing, Aida is well known for her art repoussé metal works, which have made it into many art collections.

Joe Horgan, a former neighbour writer and poet, and her mother Nina, are credited with giving her the push to start writing the columns when the kids had all gone off to school. 

He was also the one to impart the wisdom of Gore Vidal who famously said: ‘Don’t cry on the page.’’ Aida does not cry on the page in this​, her first stupendous book. Instead, it reads like a love story.