“Harriet Alida Lye writes with generosity, clarity, and grace—even as she gives us two characters who wound as deeply as they love. Mothers and daughters have a uniquely terrifying power over one another, and Lye captures the beauty of this connection and its sorrow in wise and shimmering sentences. She draws northern Paris with strokes so vivid you can feel the light on your face. Finishing this book, I felt the kind of grief you feel when you’ve been in extraordinary hands and then are set down, gently, and must interpret the world for yourself again.” —Emma Knight, author of The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus
“Harriet Alida Lye’s Natural Killer is a rare thing: a work of art about bearing the unbearable that is somehow lively and propulsive, even joyous. This is prose full of oxygen and curiosity, propelled by rhythms faithful to the range of a pulse: sometimes elegant and steady, sometimes flickering and faint, sometimes frantic with fear or want. It’s a tale textured by hospital days but told from the deepest reaches of a soul, where language runs clear as water, tuning our nerves to that deep and daily business that belongs to all of us: the work and art and gift of being alive.”
— Leslie Jamison, author of Splinters
“Gorgeous, brutal, a meteorite of a book. Natural Killer holds the sheer force and radical beauty of the miracle it depicts. Harriet Alida Lye was supposed to die at fifteen and did not. She then went on to become a mother. Looking into the dark centre of love, death and new life, Lye writes with the wisdom and measure of a young Didion. To read this memoir is to be changed by it.”
—Claudia Dey, author of Daughter
“Never have I read a more moving book on the fragile filament of life, the bond between people who love one another and struggle to find the words to express that love. The words are here, so wise and specific and drawn from the inward part. Harriet Alida Lye has no truck with fantasy or faith or folderol. She is a star witness to the bloom of life that surrounds death, and her work demands access to our unsentimental hearts.”
—Michael Winter, author of Into the Blizzard
“Natural Killer is less a cancer memoir (though it is that) as a wise and heart-affirming reflection on the ties that bind us to one another: on motherhood but also daughterhood, control and surrender, and the body’s limit experiences. Harriet Alida Lye brilliantly weaves her materials together, from firsthand memories to medical records, scenes of the body ravaged and scenes of the body creating, in a truly original work of autobiography.”
—Lauren Elkin, author of Scaffolding and Flâneuse
Advance Praise for Motherclown
“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, #1 NYT bestselling author of Every Summer After and One Golden Summer
“Motherclown has a heart that keeps beating if you try to put it down. It’s beautiful ideas conveyed in the loveliest sentences; it’s how relatable it is to feel lost and yearning as a young woman and then all over again in midlife—but it’s mostly that Harriet Alida Lye has a voice so distinct, so smart and real and delightful, you just want to stay in her head and never leave.” —Ashley Audrain, NYT bestselling author of The Push
“In Motherclown, the beautiful and the bleak are intimately entangled, and yet hope always wins. There is so much propulsion and energy in the story, alongside the universal search for belonging but also differentiation. With her distinctive blend of lush language and honest intelligence, Harriet Alida Lye deftly examines the push and pull between mothers and daughters and the search for wholeness in oneself.” —Janika Oza, bestselling author of A History of Burning, winner of the APALA Award for Literature
“Catherine and Elise are fascinating yet frustrating, empathetic yet unyielding, and fully alive in all their complexity. They attain particular resonance against the backdrop of a Paris that we rarely see on the page, an astute depiction of how the City of Light often illuminates that which we most long to keep in the dark. Motherclown is remarkable.” —Nafkote Tamirat, author of The Parking Lot Attendant, a NYT Notable Book of the Year
Harriet Alida Lye is the award-winning author of The Honey Farm, Natural Killer, Let It Destroy You, and the forthcoming novel Motherclown. She is also the co-author of a children’s picture book called Serge the Snail Without a Shell. Her essays and reporting have been published in The Globe & Mail, The New York Times, and more. She teaches creative writing at the University of Toronto’s School of Continuing Studies, and she works with authors as a mentor and editor at Flying Books and Humber College. She has lived in Halifax, Paris, Amsterdam, New York, and now lives in Toronto with her partner, their two children, and two dogs.