Alexie Morin (Justine Latour)

“When people look at me, they don’t see what they’re supposed to see. … When I communicate with others, they don’t hear what they’re supposed to hear,” writes Alexie Morin in Open Your Heart, a work of autofiction that won the Prix des libraires in 2019. It now appears in English, translated by Aimee Wall, whose authorial debut, We, Jane, was longlisted for the 2021 Scotiabank Giller Prize.

While any human might easily identify with Morin’s expression of alienation, she isn’t speaking in general terms. Facial asymmetry resulting from an eye disorder and a belated diagnosis of ADHD are possible explanations for why the author has always stood apart from other people, and she explores these explanations, as well as the death of a childhood friend, to consider the question, “How did I become myself?”

To open one’s heart means to lay the truth bare and connect with emotion, though she notes an additional connotation – “open heart” as in surgery (reflective of what happened to her late friend), which is messy and bleeding, and the mess of Morin’s story is shame. She intends her book to be a record of her most vulnerable moments, inviting the reader into these experiences, where she hopes to finally be understood and also to understand herself.

But Morin’s project is complicated when she realizes that her earliest memories have been lost to her and she is unable to connect with her childhood self, although the evocative conjuring of her working-class rural Quebec background is one of the book’s chief appeals. Morin comes from “Not the fancy Eastern Townships [but] the industrial one. … It is brown rivers covered in suspicious foam, rivers with dynamited beds, abandoned dams.”

She writes, “I have tried to determine if the little girl I used to be was really so unhappy, or if the passage of time had reduced it to that.” The results are inconclusive for writer and reader alike, with signs that Morin’s narrative of suffering and alienation is unreliable – she alludes to strong friendships throughout high school, yet she learns that a group she longed to be a part of thought she hated them. Such narrative instability, however, is integral to her project, which is about memory and history, fact and fiction, and our unknowability to both our own selves and to each other.

If Morin’s title is a plea, some readers will have some trouble responding. The prose is often vague – for example, Morin recalls that, when pushed to anger, “my veins filled with that icy fluid that renders you capable of the most horrible acts.” Despite a stated intention to explore emotions, her narrator comes across as cold and disconnected.

Yet it’s interesting that such criticism only serves to underline Morin’s entire thesis. Open Your Heart is hardly an enveloping read, but, in its strangeness and originality, it manages to be curiously engaging.