Photo: Courtesy of Showtime.
If you're reading this, you're probably impatiently waiting for tonight's Homeland season three premiere. It's been a long, hard nine months since the explosion at the CIA, and we've been overanalyzing pretty much every aspect of the cliff-hanger since season two wrapped up. We don't have any spoilers or insider tips for tonight's kickoff (Showtime's kept mum on pretty much everything), but we are learning a lot more about Carrie's past, thanks to the recently released book
Homeland: Carrie's Run.
The novel, written by former war correspondent Andrew Kaplan in tandem with the show's writing team, follows our favorite CIA analyst during her life and career leading up to the events that kicked off the show. It details her 2006 stint in Beirut, where she challenges the CIA's top brass in an attempt to uncover connections to the ever-elusive Abu Nazir. To help you get pumped for tonight's big premiere, the book's author is dishing out 10 fascinating facts about Carrie Mathison that will help you get inside her brilliant, complicated head. See it all below, and don't worry — your Homeland dreams are about to come true.
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1. Carrie’s middle name is Anne. Her full name is Caroline Anne Mathison.
2. Carrie was born in Dearborn, MI, but grew up in Kensington, MD. The family had to move because her father, Frank, lost his job (after his bipolar disorder, which Carrie inherited, caused him not to show up at work). They moved to Maryland, because he finally got a job in Bethesda.
3. Carrie was a high-school and a college NCAA athlete, a runner. Her event was the 1,500 meters.
4. Both Carrie and her sister, Maggie, went to a Catholic high school, Holy Trinity High, in Kensington.
5. Carrie graduated from Princeton University, with a B.A. in Near East studies. It was Carrie’s background in Near Eastern culture along with her ability to speak Arabic that made the CIA recruit her.
6. Carrie’s passion for modern jazz, particularly of the bebop '40s, '50s, and '60s era, was sparked when she was introduced to it by her first lover, John, her political science professor at Princeton.
7. It was also at Princeton that Carrie experienced her first full-fledged bipolar episode, during which she wrote a 45-page manifesto titled, “How I Reinvented Music.” She then ran naked, except for a jacket, through the snow to the first professor she saw, a Professor Sanchez, who got her to the Student Health Center with the help of some students.
8. Carrie first learned about the drug Clozapine when it was recommended by a Lebanese doctor during a summer she spent at the Overseas Political Studies Program through American University in Beirut. It was this drug that made controlling her bipolar disorder and living a somewhat normal life possible.
9. Carrie met and became friends with Virgil in Beirut in 2006, when they both worked for the CIA. It was Virgil who suggested she wear a wedding ring when she went out to bars if she didn’t want to attract unwanted male company.
10. Viewers know that during a time when she had been recalled to Langley, Carrie had an affair with David Estes, director of the Counter-Terrorism Center. In the book, we learn that Estes followed her to New York, where she and Saul had gone to stop a major terrorist plot, and that Carrie and David met intimately at the New York Palace Hotel.