Jovette Marchessault, a self-taught artist and writer, is well known for her work as a painter, sculptor, novelist, and playwright. Born in Montreal in 1938 to working-class parents, Alice Bertrand and Roger Marchessault, she spent her childhood in Montreal and in the nearby countryside, as she recounts in her autobiographical novels Comme une enfant de la terre (1975) and La Mere des herbes (1980). In the latter she describes the traumatic move from the countryside to one of the poorer quarters of Montreal, where she attended school until the age of thirteen when she quit in order to work. From her first job at a diaper service she went on to work in the textile industry and then to a series of jobs. At the age of thirty-one, with the death of her grandmother Louisa Marchessault, she gave up employment at the Grolier encyclopedia company--transposed in La Mère des...