Motherclown - by Harriet Alida Lye Paperback

Book Synopsis

In the wake of her father's death, twenty-one-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.

Review Quotes

"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 is delicious for the soul, with a heart that keeps beating if you try to put it down. It's the achy complexity of being a mother and being that mother's daughter; 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

"Motherclown is a stunning, explosive novel. 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, NYT bestselling author of The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus

"There is no one like Harriet Alida Lye when it comes to unravelling the most profound joys and shameful moments of any mother-daughter relationship, and the connection between Catherine and Elise is a standout. Both women 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 New York Times Notable Book of the Year

Praise for Let It Destroy You:

"Drawing on letters and other documents of the time, the author invites us into the marriage of August and June Snow, as they await August's trial at the International War Crimes Court. August has been accused of patenting a more lethal variation of the atomic bomb. His reason for developing this terrifying technology is not for the destruction it could unleash but as a desperate attempt to save his child. This compelling novel speaks of power: of individual pride, of gender roles, of world-wide destruction. Both utterly intimate and terrifyingly vast, with gorgeous prose and luminescent intelligence, Harriet Alida Lye challenges the reader to ask the deeply ethical questions about the choices we make in life." --Jury Citation, Vine National Canadian Jewish Book Awards (Fiction)

"The paradox of loneliness in marriage, the shockwave of parental love--staged against history's most devastating invention, the story of August and June Snow is a tender, anguished duet, glimmering with intelligence and grace." -- Sarah Henstra, Governor General's Award-winning author of The Red Word

Praise for Natural Killer

"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 Flâneuse

"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 and Heartbreaker

Praise for The Honey Farm

"Mysterious, suspenseful, and unnerving, The Honey Farm offers a thrilling narrative that examines the distorted realities and conflicting perceptions that often exist in the quietest places." --Iain Reid, bestselling author of I'm Thinking of Ending Things

"A honey-mouthed debut ruminating on creation, possession, and faith. Lye's lush, poetic prose soars off the page. Each lyrical line feels like a gift left at the reader's altar." --Kirkus Reviews

About the Author