On the Wall

Eisoptrophobia is the fear of ­looking at oneself in the mirror. It’s a condition that can cause anxiety, dry mouth, and panic. But such sensations do not play into Cora Siré’s fifth book, Fear the Mirror, a series of intersecting stories that offer an unflinching look at the lives of various members of her family.

Leonard Cohen once called poetry a verdict; the same could be said about autobiographical fiction. An epigraph in this book quotes from Colum McCann’s Thirteen Ways of Looking —“Poets, like detectives, know the truth is laborious: it doesn’t occur by accident”— and establishes the tone for its ambitious trajectory. The setting is Montreal, which is also the city of Nicole Brossard, whose work is, in the words of the British author Ann Morgan, “rich, ambiguous and fluid.” Siré shares many of these qualities. Brossard may be the more lyrical of the two writers...