Natural Killer: A Memoir of Love, Death, and New Life

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.