Harriet Alida Lye is the award-winning author of the novels Let It Destroy You and The Honey Farm, the memoir Natural Killer, and the co-author of the picture book Serge the Snail Without a Shell. Her essays and reporting have been published in The New York Times, The Globe and Mail, National Post, The Happy Reader, Hazlitt, Vice, Catapult, and more. She has lived in Halifax, Paris, Amsterdam, New York, and now lives in Toronto with her partner, their two children, and two dogs.
“Harriet Alida Lye’s extraordinary Motherclown is a gorgeously crafted, heart-wrenching examination of the most complicated of love stories: that between a mother and daughter. I adored it!” –Carley Fortune
A dual coming-of-age story about performance—both public and private—sexuality, envy, and grief. Motherclown explores the most fundamental and potentially explosive of human relationships: that of a mother and her daughter.
In the wake of her father’s death, 21-year-old Elise leaves her boyfriend, mother, and hometown of Niagara Falls to move to Paris. She’s earned a place at Chevalier, an elite physical theatre school with a focus on clown. Not “clown-clown,” but the pursuit of an inner child. At Chevalier, they don’t follow scripts—they follow their souls. The school is merciless, and it is the best.
Left behind, Elise’s mother, Catherine, is unravelling. At first, she feels irritated, as if she’s just been demoted: from wife to widow, mother to empty-nester. She longs for the creative life she lost when she became pregnant, and in the quiet of the empty house, she becomes haunted by regret, and a secret she never told her daughter. When Elise disappears into Paris, Catherine follows.
But Elise, awakening to her own creative power, feels ambushed by her mother’s arrival. As Paris works its spell on them both, old wounds surface and resentments ignite. Can Elise hear her mother without losing herself? Can Catherine face the real reason she followed her daughter to Paris or is she there—as Elise believes—to swallow her daughter whole?
Motherclown is an electric novel about art and inheritance, desire and devotion, and the ferocious, vulnerable love between mothers and daughters.
“Gorgeous, brutal, a meteorite of a book. Natural Killer holds the sheer force and radical beauty of the miracle it depicts… Looking into the dark centre of love, death and new life, Lye writes with the wisdom and measure of a young Didion.” –Claudia Dey
In this harrowing and intimate memoir, Harriet Alida Lye explores how, at just 15 years old, she was diagnosed with a variant of leukemia called Natural Killer, named “the rarest and worst malignancy.” The average survival time of patients with this diagnosis is 58 days. There were no known survivors
Told through a seamless blend of narrative, medical notes, and journal entries, Natural Killer: A Memoir of Love, Death, and New Life explores what it’s like to live with a life-threatening illness and survive it, and how the memory of a body turning against itself resurfaces at moments of profound vulnerability, especially in becoming a mother. After having spent nine months living at Toronto’s SickKids Hospital as a teenager, Harriet spent most of her pregnancy reckoning with how to trust a body that had once committed the ultimate betrayal.
With probing lyricism and searing honesty, Lye examines what it means not just to survive the impossible, but to build a life in its aftermath.
In the spirit of reconciliation, we acknowledge that we live, work and play on the traditional territories of the Blackfoot Confederacy (Siksika, Kainai, Piikani), the Tsuut’ina, the Iyarhe Nakoda Nations, the Otipemisiwak Métis Government of the Métis Nation within Alberta District 6, and all people who make their homes in the Treaty 7 region of Southern Alberta.
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