BY AMANDA LEDUC
Larissa Lai is having a moment. “I’m feeling a bit like a deer in the headlights,” she says, laughing on the phone from her home in Calgary. Lai’s latest novel, The Tiger Flu, recently published w ith Arsenal Pulp Press. “I’m excited, obviously, and also there’s this feeling of relief that it’s finally out in the world. But with the relief there’s also this sense of amazement that it’s done. For me it carries a sense of something major coming to fruition – it feels like a big life turn.”
That, she says, is due in part to the amount of time it took to get The Tiger Flu into the world. Lai’s previous novel, Salt Fish Girl, was published in 2002. Her debut, When Fox Is a Thousand, first published in 1995, was reissued by Arsenal Pulp in 2004. “It was such a different experience writing those first two novels,” she says. “There was an openness and a willingness to free-fall that I miss. This has been a fundamentally different experience in writing.”