On the Alchemy of a Life: Delahrose Roobie Myer’s Fatima’s Alchemy

Some books behave like rooms, others like mirrors, and a rarer few that act like thresholds. Delahrose Roobie Myer’s Fatima’s Alchemy is one of the latter. It does not simply recount a life. It opens it, as if lifting the lid on an ancient reliquary, revealing the small, luminous artefacts a person gathers while surviving herself.

The book begins with a poem titled Time a succinct invocation that functions like a tuning fork for the entire text. Its lines do not strive for ornament. Instead, they steady the reader for what is coming: a descent not into narrative but into consciousness.

Myer writes from the vantage point of someone who has lived at the edge of her own weather system: the storms, the clearings, the inexplicable calm that arrives after a long interior fire. Her project is not a confession. It is not even a memoir in the conventional sense. It is something closer to cosmology.

A Life Rendered as Mythic Architecture

Fatima, the figure at the centre of the book, is not a protagonist so much as a vessel, a mythic double in whom the author stores what is too heavy to name directly. Fatima is a witness, wanderer, and alchemist. She carries the weight of exile and the gift of unusual perception. Her world is made of symbols, lakes bright as silver plates, cracked statues, webbed caverns, stardust scattered like insulation over a newly forming heart.

Myer’s myth-making is not whimsical. It is structural. In a literary era where spirituality often collapses into platitude, she reinstates myth as a rigorous technology for understanding the psyche.

In The Fable of the Moonlit Forge, Fatima’s suffering becomes the crucible through which she is refined, each hardship a bellows forcing the spirit into a new shape.

This is the logic of alchemy, but also the logic of survival.