Author Alicia Elliott.Cole Burston/The Canadian Press
At 18, while her fellow undergraduates at York University were partying and sleeping in, Alicia Elliott was navigating the shock of new motherhood, a transformation that was scarier, lonelier and grosser than she had been led to believe. Less Anne Geddes, more David Cronenberg.
“Like, why did no one tell me this?” she recalls in an interview. “Why are they all talking about motherhood as though it’s this flowery, angelic thing, and not talking about the wreckage that it causes in your life and your body?”
She funnelled the disorienting experience into a short story, one that never quite felt finished; she kept working on it, trying to find the ending. Many years later, she realized it was part of a larger story about motherhood, madness and grief.
On June 6, the resulting novel, And Then She Fell, received the Amazon Canada First Novel Award, a $60,000 cash prize for a debut work of fiction. Hailed by judge francesca ekwuyasi for its “gripping narrative and surreal twists,” the book is darkly funny, startlingly original and genuinely terrifying. It’s also a novel about the act of writing itself, as Elliott’s protagonist, Alice, wrestles with her ambition to write a modern version of the Haudenosaunee creation story, which begins as Sky Woman plummets from the heavens toward what will become our earth.
Elliott, a Tuscarora writer from Six Nations, uses her novel to slyly interrogate settlers’ centuries-long fascination with her people. The American constitution was famously templated on the Great Law of Peace, the oral constitution of the Haudenosaunee people; the American suffragette movement took inspiration from the freedom and autonomy enjoyed by Haudenosaunee women.
Elliott’s epigraph quotes Haudenosaunee writer Rick Monture, who asserts that anthropology began with the 1851 publication of League of the Ho-De’-No-Sau-Nee or Iroquois by Lewis Henry Morgan. The irony, Elliott points out, is that as Haudenosaunee people’s culture and language were being seized by colonialism, it was simultaneously being preserved in academic texts; later, Haudenosaunee people had to search for their own knowledge among the observations of an outsider.
“This is something common for Haudenosaunee people,” she says. “To try and explain what we mean when we say things, as opposed to what people have gleaned from what we say.”
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Like Sky Woman, Alice is in free fall. After a whirlwind romance with a rich, white academic named Steve, she finds herself whisked from the rez bingo hall to an upscale Toronto enclave, where her neighbours and new mother-in-law surveil her with curiosity and suspicion. She and Steve attend faculty dinners with the kind of people who “introduced themselves not by talking about their families, but by explaining how they made money.”
As the novel begins, she is grieving the recent loss of her mother and struggling to connect with her newborn daughter, Dawn. With visceral immediacy, Elliott captures the jagged horror of postpartum as Alice tries to nurse a screaming baby who refuses to latch, then hides in the bathroom with a hand mirror to examine her thick, black stitches with grim curiosity. She’s also slipping into psychosis, and her delusions and paranoia are heightened by her isolation from her Mohawk friends and family, as well as the constant barrage of microaggressions and racist encounters that Steve refuses to see. As she labours over her creation story, he hovers over her laptop, gleaning.
In 2019, Elliott published her first book, A Mind Spread Out on the Ground, a wide-ranging essay collection that drew on her experiences with racism, colonialism, teenage pregnancy and growing up with a mother who struggled with mania and psychosis.
While on tour, she unearthed the old story she’d written about a shell-shocked new mother, and another one that became the novel’s prologue, in which a delusional teenage Alice converses with the cartoon version of Pocahontas, whose real name was Matoaka. “Don’t bother trying to pronounce it,” she sneers, before talking Alice out of an ill-fated hookup with the local bad boy. She began putting the pieces together, drawing on the “darker sorts of fiction” and Anne Rice’s novels which had captivated her as a teenager.
Then, while researching the novel in 2020, Elliott had a psychotic episode. Once she emerged, she wrote in the preface to And Then She Fell, “I realized everything I had assumed about madness from watching my mother was wrong.” In fiction, madness is often deployed as a narrative trick; it’s an efficient way of pulling the rug out from under the unsuspecting reader.
But Elliott never conceals Alice’s psychosis from the reader, who is along with the conversations with Disney princesses and time-travelling cockroaches; instead, they’re a witness to the interior logic of her madness.
“I just needed to write it as she’s experiencing it,” Elliott says. “It was really important to me that people understand what she was feeling, and how she could be feeling that way.” Because for Elliott, the madness itself isn’t the scariest or most interesting part. “The most terrifying thing is after it runs its course,” she says. “How do you sit there, knowing everyone thinks you’re crazy?”
And Then She Fell proceeds chronologically for the first two-thirds until Alice’s psychosis reaches a terrifying, gruesome crescendo, at which point Elliott pulls the reader through space and time toward a revelatory, devastating conclusion. To say more would spoil the emotional impact of that final third, which grapples with the aftershocks of madness that reverberate across a lifetime, and the torturous possibility of its recurrence. “It’s like a sword hanging over you,” Elliott says. “I had to reckon with that uncertainty.”
At the same time, Elliott says, she wanted to challenge the belief that madness invalidates a person’s experience and value. “I wanted the book to connect with people who have experienced mania,” she says, “For them to see and feel that moment where someone is saying – even to a fictional character – that they still matter.”
Near the book’s conclusion, Alice comes to understand something, too. “The most important thing wasn’t that she had fallen,” she realizes. “The most important thing was that she had been caught. That she had allowed herself to be caught.”