SOURCE: "The I as Sight and Site: Memory and Space in Audrey Thomas's Fiction," in Canadian Women Writing Fiction, edited by Mickey Pearlman, University Press of Mississippi, 1993, pp. 116-25.

Tiger is a Canadian writer, educator, and broadcaster. In the following essay, she analyzes Thomas's autobiographical construction of her characters' memories and its effect on her definition of female space and self-exploration.

Novelist of memory, Audrey Thomas has hewn from autobiographical momenta both stable and unstable narrative foundations for her houses of fiction. That fiction, thematically and structurally, is recognizable by its continuous delight in repetitions. Also characteristic of Audrey Thomas is her successful delivery of and flair for what I would here call a legend of self-projections; British Columbia's answer to Colette, Thomas is a writer of very specific witness whose world is bounded by family, flora, fauna, and that intertidal life whose symbolic soundings resonate especially distinctly...