Her writing was often informed by the cultural displacement, and the subsequent sense of dual belonging, that she experienced when her parents divorced and her mother remarried to an anglophone man.
[2] Corbeil was raised and educated exclusively in French in childhood, and later transferred to a private English school, Miss Edgar's and Miss Cramp's School,[3] after her mother's remarriage.
[4] First known as an arts reporter for The Globe and Mail in the 1980s,[5] she published her debut novel Voice-Over in 1992.
[1] The novel centred on a documentary filmmaker from Quebec from her childhood through to her adult relationship with an English Canadian poet;[6] although it included passages in both English and French, critics praised its code switching as "done in such a clever way that the French is understandable to a person with only the basic vocabulary.
In the 1990s, she wrote a weekly arts column for the Toronto Star.