Harriet Alida Lye

At the Hay Festival Querétaro last year, Deborah Levy spoke about avoiding the term “autofiction” when describing her work. “I don’t believe in genre,” she said. “I think that is just for a commercial thing.” I thought of the comment while reading Therese Estacion’s powerful Jelly, Baby. To call these meditations a collection of essays is perhaps evidence of the challenge of trying to wedge art into commercial…

In one way, I have been writing my  memoir since I was fifteen, when I was diagnosed with a novel variant of an extremely rare leukemia, called natural killer, which had no known survivors. When I returned to high school after missing the end of grade 9 and the beginning of grade 10, I enrolled in a writing…

The narrator of Back Roads is experiencing an existential crisis. So is the novel itself, Andrée A. Michaud’s eleventh. Originally published as Routes secondaires in 2017, it is part mystery, part exploration of its own creation. The writer protagonist’s identity is unclear, as is the question of whether the strange woman she encounters on a forest road is her…