Bright urgency surges through "BriannaSusannaAlana" like an electrical charge. Here is the heady fizz of a writer doing a loop-de-loop with language - the alphabet a yo-yo, a Slinky, a spinning top a-fire under Heather Birrell's nimble guidance. Three sisters, a murder, swing sets, sexual initiation, and a rocket pod. The world's tallest free-standing structure hovering like a sentinel in the distance. This is childhood both as paradise before the fall and as a state of emergency. This is only the beginning. -- 2006 Journey Prize jury (Zsuzsi Gartner, Steven Galloway, Annabel Lyon)

"Heather Birrell's sentences conjure worlds. These stories scintillate. Smart, sharp, alluring, they're full of the chance encounters, mysteries, missed connections and unexpected tenderness of contemporary life."
Catherine Bush,
Author of Minus Time and The Rules of Engagement

"My favourite beach read so far this summer has been Toronto writer Heather Birrell's short story collection, I know you are but what am I? Birrell's writing is full of tastes and colours and zingers like 'the slow red sun' that 'bursts into the white light of southern hospitality. 'Y'all,' says the sun, and really means it. 'Y'all!'"
Annabel Lyon,
The National Post

"(...) A girl who can write, too! Heather Birrell has collected nine of her smart and sassy stories of the urban condition in yet another well-packaged outing for the fully revived Coach House Press. (...) Birrell has a grand eye for the small detail that is the hallmark of the well-made story. Best of all, there's little Chick Lit preoccupation with the sad lot of sexy young singles in a collection that features both kids and adults, 'kleptomaniacs, convicts, roof-walkers and homicidal hippies."
Toronto Star

"The summer-camp antics and first love in Heather Birrell's Congratulations, Really [now of I know you are but what am I?], hit home with note-perfect retrospective coming-of-age clarity."
NOW Magazine

"Heather Birrell's bewitching stories wield a potent double-edge: each story left me feeling both soothed by beauty and devastatingly alone in the world. The unsettling push-pull between blithe forgetfulness and bittersweet awareness makes for a collection that yields many pleasures: a pleasure to read, a pleasure to contemplate, a pleasure to unthinkingly, happily consume."
Heidi Julavits,
Co-editor of The Believer,
Author of The Effect of Living Backwards

Heather Birrell's first collection of stories is a charming and fluid read. (…) Summarizing the plots of these stories and their themes is a somewhat futile exercise as much of their success lies in Birrell's humane, idiosyncratic prose. Birrell's style is curiously contradictory: both incisive and vague, philosophical and prosaic, it denies its characters easy redemptive endings. The stories are often as individual and fragmented as childhood memory itself. Birrell also has a great ear for dialogue, and the intimacy between characters is artful as well as poignantly rendered. (…) IKYABWAI firmly establishes Birrell as a quirky and talented young writer to watch for, on and off the playground.
Ibi Kaslik
Matrix Magazine

As in all the stories in this marvellous, elliptical collection, where the
story begins gives hardly any sense of where it will end, or what it might be about. (...) The reader follows the scenes, all of which are 'swift,
shiny, and vulnerable to vantage point' willingly, because of Birrell's
precise and inventive descriptions (a woman has 'legs like tree trunks and a mouth like a rip in a mattress'), as well as her acute sense of psychological intricacies. This is story by juxtaposition rather than strictly linear narrative, and if the stories in this collection owe something to the marvellous circularity of Alice Munro, they also pay tribute to Raymond Carver for their quiet, restrained accumulation of meaning. (...) In these wonderfully written stories, it is the unshakeable rendering of life and its random vantage points that yields meaning.
Goldberry Long
University of Toronto Quarterly

"Time and again in this nine-story collection, Birrell weaves patterns of flashbacks, walk-on characters, best-ever similes (an airplane windown like an eyelid), and -- most importantly -- struggling, complicated protagonists. This creates little universes both vast and intimate. (...) I will read this book again, and soon; Birrell has a talent matched by few others for tapping the rich details of our experience."
Adam Lewis Schroeder,
This Magazine

I was immediately seduced by Heather BIrrell's first collection of short stories. It's true that the pleasurable texture of the definitive Coach House laid-finished paper made me purr, and the quirky collaged sourpuss girl on the cover stood out while the book taunted me with its bratty title. But the stories could have been scrawled on loose leaf paper and they'd still hold their own. (...) If you normally shy away from short stories because you fear they don't offer the weight or journey of a solid novel, make this your exception. Birrell is a bright new talent to watch out for, and a pleasure to discover -- hers is a read that incites breathless absorption within the quirks of her offbeat narratives.
Zoe Whittall
Women's Post

“(…) all nine stories in I know you are but what am I? are to be savoured for the quality of their writing, the sheer sentence-by-sentence pleasure to be wrung from their wit and insight. Like 9-year-old Maddie in “The Captain’s Name was Ned,” Birrell “squints the meaning into things” by viewing them sideways, whether it’s childhood’s “dirty, adorable, dismembered dolls … graffiti and growth spurts,” or the dizzying expanse of an unknown country, its “licence plates and other people’s laundry.” More significantly, there is a refreshing courage to Birrell’s light touch, a pay-off to her decision to eschew self-conscious profundity. For, at its best, her fiction strings a tightrope between comedy and tragedy, and encourages us to walk that vertiginous edge. (…) [ I know you are but what am I?] seduce[s] with a series of witty, well wrought, yet deliberately off-kilter stories that investigate questions of identity through the keen, absurdist lens of a literary Lynda Barry, and, in doing so, shed far more light on the absurd conundrums of Canadian-ness than your average award-winning intergenerational family saga. Take this book with you on your next flight to Florida, pack it along on the Greyhound to New York. I know you are but what am I? may sound like a needlessly confusing question, but Birrell’s debut collection is more than well worth the read.”
Cathy Stonehouse
Books in Canada

"The first thing I loved about Heather Birrell's tight little collection of stories was her characters. She conjures up for us nine very different, disparate universes, and the humans she populates them with are all delicious. (...) [They] are kids and adults, men and women, freakish and familiar, complicated and mundane. But I believed in every one of them. With I Know You Are but What Am I?, Birrell takes a playschool taunt and in nine stories turns it into a mantra that her characters use to reveal themselves to us."
Ivan Coyote
The Georgia Straight