With a new introduction by Ashley Audrain, author of The Push and The Whispers "I need people to know that I exist, that their experiment worked, that by some combination of luck and science, I'm alive." In this harrowing and intimate memoir, Harriet Alida Lye explores how, at just fifteen years old, she was diagnosed with a variant of leukemia called Natural Killer, named "the rarest and worst malignancy." The average survival time of patients with this diagnosis is fifty-eight days. There were no known survivors. Told through a seamless blend of narrative, medical notes, and journal entries, Natural Killer explores what it's like to live with a life-threatening illness and survive it, and how the memory of a body turning against itself resurfaces at moments of profound vulnerability, especially in becoming a mother. After having spent nine months living at Toronto's SickKids Hospital as a teenager, Harriet spent most of her pregnancy reckoning with how to trust a body that had once committed the ultimate betrayal. With probing lyricism and searing honesty, Harriet Alida Lye examines what it means not just to survive the impossible, but to build a life in its aftermath. Praise for Harriet Alida Lye and Natural Killer "Harriet Alida Lye's Natural Killer is a rare thing: a work of art about bearing the unbearable that is somehow lively and propulsive, even joyous. This is prose full of oxygen and curiousity, propelled by rhythms faithful to the range of a pulse: sometimes elegant and steady, sometimes flickering and faint, sometimes frantic with fear or want. It's a tale textured by hospital days but told from the deepest reaches of a soul, where language runs clear as water, tuning our nerves to that deep and daily business that belongs to all of us: the work and art and gift of being alive." --Leslie Jamison, author of Splinters: Another Kind of Love Story and The Empathy Exams "What a rare thing to read a book that makes you pause in reflection on nearly every page. Natural Killer is a remarkable story of an inspiring family that is both heartbreaking and hopeful. Alida Lye's writing, intimate and subtle, asks profound questions about life, death, hope and trust that made me grateful to have spent time in her beautiful mind. This work, crafted so thoughtfully, will stay with me for a very long time." --Ashley Audrain, author of The Push and The Whispers "The writing in Natural Killer contains the strange whimsy only the voice of a survivor can have. Recounting her cancer, Lye recaptures the state of grace teenagers live in even in the darkest moments. She then brings us close to the absurdity and wonder of childbirth. In succinct and addictive and generous prose she details the perils and miracles of living in a human body, on the days when it is out to kill us and those when it is making a whole other life inside us." --Heather O'Neill, author of The Capital of Dreams and Lullabies for Little Criminals "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 Scaffolding "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 Heartbreaker and Stunt " Natural Killer is a breathtaking memoir full of clarity, courage, and wisdom. In opening up her transition from child to mother, Harriet Alida Lye shows how fear and love can become unifying forces in a body that both takes and gives life. This story will stay with me for a long time." --Claire Cameron, author of How to Survive a Bear Attack "Harriet Alida Lye takes the enormous cruelty of indiscriminate disease and creates something truly beautiful and deeply moving. A book about the terror of death that is brimming with the warmth and vibrancy of life." --Stacey May Fowles