Broken Fiction is a collection of short autofictional stories and poems that both offer solace and depict anguish at the collision of memory, loss, and grief. This kind of story-making negotiates a recognition and acceptance of hard truths without resorting to easy resolution.

The pieces in this volume are playful and fierce. The narrator's willingness to give attention to where love works or goes wrong, or to the moments when suffering cannot be veiled by a positive attitude—even as the comic or absurd overwhelms the tragic and humiliating—takes us to places that inhabit both memory and fiction. Photographs break the fiction and pull the reader into the inevitable forces of time and loss and death.

Broken Fiction invites readers to consider a way through—and sometimes around—illness and love, pain and joy, and gives a droplet of hope in nature's comedy of errors and coincidence.

Marlene Kadar is an associate professor in humanities and women’s studies at York University, and the former director of the graduate programme in interdisciplinary studies. Her publications include Essays on Life Writing, which won the Gabrielle Roy Prize (English) for 1992. Kadar’s research interests include the politics of life writing, especially as represented in survivor narratives; the construction of privilege and knowledge in women’s life writing; and, Hungarian and Romani autobiography and historical accounts, biographical traces and fragments.

Susanna Egan is a professor in the department of English at the University of British Columbia. Her most recent monograph is titled Mirror Talk: Genres of Crisis in Contemporary Autobiography.

Jeanne Perreault is a professor in the Department of English at the University of Calgary and is the author of Writing Selves: Contemporary Feminist Autography.

Linda Warley teaches in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Waterloo. She has published articles in journals such as Canadian Literature, a/b: Auto/Biography Studies, and Reading Canadian Autobiography, a special issue of Essays on Canadian Writing.

Marlene Kadar's profile page

"This is a quirky and powerful book, original, heartbreaking, clever, enigmatic, oh so intelligent, sometimes angry, and more often humorous in a sly way. This is prose that slips into poetry. This is snatches of memory, a glimpse of family history, a dream journal, and a series of love letters. This is what the title says it is, broken fiction. It is autobiographical in some parts, not in others, except in the sense that authors always leave traces of themselves behind."
—Jan Rehner, author of The House of Izieu and Almost True

"In what is perhaps best described as a series of meditations, at once intimate and philosophical, Marlene Kadar writes of illness and treatment, family members both living and dead, her own memories and history's so-called facts. Part journal, part fiction, Broken Fiction refuses to be one kind of book. It encompasses moments of sadness and grief with sharp insight and humour to find delight and certainly love."
—Linda Warley, Associate Professor Emerita of English, University of Waterloo

"With a writing style that is clear and concise, while also containing traces of sarcasm and a beautiful sardonic wit, Marlene Kadar tells us how it is. Broken Fiction is a multi-part, braided essay that marries the fictional, the known, and the imagined with philosophy and scientific and medical exploration—and poetry. In fact, the poetry is what stands out to me most—for it winds its way through the writing from beginning to end... Kadar shines here—and in the darkest moments, she shows us light."
—Carolyne Van Der Meer, author of Journeywoman and Sensorial