One of my most anticipated books of 2023, And Then She Fell is the debut novel of Alicia Elliott, a Haudenosaunee writer living in Ontario. Her collection of essays, A Mind Spread Out on the Ground, was one of my favourite books in 2019 when I read it. I was hyped for this one, to say the least. And Elliott’s foray into literary horror is a solid debut. A dark, creeping story about madness, motherhood, and the ways modern Indigenous reality intersects with these issues, this novel is a strong exploration of these issues through a conversational narrator.
“Elliott’s foray into literary horror is a solid debut.”
Teenage Alice is passing her time normally on the rez – crushing on a boy, working in the fairly gross job of selling 50/50 tickets at the racetrack, being a girl worried about her friends and if she’s going to lose her virginity in time for high school. But the most striking thing about this period is that it’s when she first hallucinates, imagining that Pocahontas, from the wildly inaccurate and racist Disney movie, speaks to her while watching it. And not only that, speaks to her about the choices she’s making and tells her about the real Pocahontas, a girl named Matoaka.
Adult Alice is now a married woman, living in Toronto. She left the rez to marry Stephan, a white professor at the University of Toronto. They have a newborn daughter, Dawn, and Alice is simultaneously navigating new motherhood while grieving her own mother. We are squarely in Alice’s head, immersed in her attempts to sort out motherhood, deal with her grief, and manage the many microaggressions from being an Indigenous woman surrounded by white people. From the clueless harms of her husband to the overt profiling by her neighbours, Alice worries all the time about what this will mean for Dawn, an eventual Indigenous woman herself.
These first two parts set up a sad, claustrophobic story. Alice starts to hallucinate again: talking cockroaches, DVD covers speaking to her, things moving which aren’t, and she starts to suffer from intrusive thoughts about harming Dawn. As she begins to feel more and more isolated from her home and her family back on the rez, Alice becomes more paranoid, culminating in what might be a psychotic breakdown, though it’s unclear from Alice’s narration.
My major grievance with this novel is that the first two parts felt disjointed from the third part. The first and second sections pair well together, with Alice’s childhood flowing neatly into her adulthood, as a married woman in Toronto. This second part is the longest and the core of the novel, with the action focusing on the weeks of Alice’s life as a new mother, attempting to settle into her days with Dawn, and yet all is not well. It becomes apparent after several chapters that this is not the fatigue of postpartum or even hints of her teenage abilities to speak with spirits returning. The pacing of this is slow and deliberate, falling slowly into Alice’s visions and madness, twisting of seeing abilities, postpartum depression, and psychosis into one confusing and terrifying spiral. Elliott does this so well that the deterioration of Alice’s mental health is hidden until it’s too late.
The third part, as a standalone, was also very good. Told from the viewpoint of Alice’s granddaughter Eden, decades later, it answers some questions from the first two parts while leaving others open, explores free will and destiny, as well as family, culture, and the ever-present racism against Indigenous peoples in North America. But after the first two parts of the story, it felt abrupt and out of step with the book’s first two sections. Elliott is a strong writer, but she doesn’t completely pull off this shift in tone, setting, and even genre to land the book firmly.
Despite how I felt about the ending, I expect And Then She Fell to stick with me for some time. Elliott’s ability to portray declining mental health in such an accurate and spellbinding way is singular, and this novel expresses so many truths about motherhood, which are still so hidden. Talking about how colonialism and inherited trauma shape experiences like motherhood through the vehicle of horror is well done here.
Alison Manley has ricocheted between New Brunswick and Nova Scotia for most of her life. Now in Halifax, Nova Scotia, she is the Cataloguing and Metadata Librarian at Saint Mary's University. Her past life includes a long stint as a hospital librarian on the banks of the mighty Miramichi River. She has an honours BA in political science and English from St. Francis Xavier University, and a Master of Library and Information Studies from Dalhousie University. While she's adamant that her love of reading has nothing to do with her work, her ability to consume large amounts of information very quickly sure is helpful. She is often identified by her very red lipstick, and lives with her partner Brett and cat, Toasted Marshmallow.
ALICIA ELLIOTT is a Mohawk writer and editor living in Brantford, Ontario. She has written for The Globe and Mail, CBC, Hazlitt and many others. She’s had numerous essays nominated for National Magazine Awards, winning Gold in 2017 and an honorable mention in 2020. Her short fiction was selected for Best American Short Stories 2018 (by Roxane Gay), Best Canadian Stories 2018 and Journey Prize Stories 30. Alicia was chosen by Tanya Talaga as the 2018 recipient of the RBC Taylor Emerging Writer Award. Her first book, A Mind Spread Out On The Ground, was a national bestseller in Canada. It was also nominated for the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction and won the Forest of Reading Evergreen Award.
- Publisher : Doubleday Canada (Sept. 26 2023)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 352 pages
- ISBN-10 : 038568410X
- ISBN-13 : 978-0385684101
