Launch of Harriet Alida Lye's Motherclown

Featuring a reading, a signing, a viewing of the Motherclown exhibition, with a curator’s talk from Ash Mulvihill of Ninth Editions, and a first look at the brand new location of the Alison Milne co. Gallery.

About Motherclown

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, 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.

About the author

HARRIET ALIDA LYE is the award-winning author of the novels Let It Destroy You and The Honey Farm, the memoir Natural Killer, and co-author of the picture book Serge the Snail Without a Shell. Her work has been published in The New York Times, The Globe and Mail, National Post, The Happy Reader, Hazlitt, Vice, Catapult, and more. She lives in Toronto.

Accessibility info

The gallery has a few small steps to the threshold at the entrance. There is a bathroom on the main floor for accessibility purposes, and there is a staircase downstairs to the lower level where the gallery continues. This lower level is not accessible without stairs. The backyard can be accessed by the sloping driveway to the left of the house.

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