It describes a real event that occurred in Manitoba, a Mennonite community in Bolivia, a more fanatical and remote setting than the one she grew up in. Toews’ new novel, Women Talking, marks a departure from her earlier books. There is plenty to praise in Toews’ writing, but I am struck by a feeling that to love her work is to love it (and her) familiarly. Instead, it is closer to an aunt pulling your hand at a reunion and reciting intimate family tales and theories. Reading Toews is not like reading an author with a particular set of thematic interests or stylistic effects. From the hospital bed, he declares, ‘I will write my way out of this mess!’ But of course, he didn’t write his way out of the mess: it was Miriam who did that. Though in many ways a convincing portrayal, his voice is instilled with nostalgia, humour and hope, at odds with a man on the brink of suicide: in her father’s voice, Toews’ own ineluctable lightness strains out. In Swing Low, the narrator recollects his life from a hospital bedroom, having suffered a depressive episode. One might expect these earlier novels to be darker and more solemn than they are in fact, Toews’ writing on death and suicide is often funny, tender, hopeful – even light-hearted. Her later novel, All My Puny Sorrows, published in 2014, also concerns a suicide in the family, this time that of her sister. Her 2001 work Swing Low is a memoir of her father, told in Toews’ imagined version of his voice. Twelve years later, her elder sister did the same. When she was thirty-four her father killed himself.
Toews grew up in a remote Canadian Mennonite (an Amish-like Christian religion) community in a loving family of four. But while Louis’ writing extends into broader areas of the political, Toews’ has been focused more intensely on the personal: on grief, humour, sex, and mental health. Both writers have created work at once inspired and confined by intense, real-life family experiences. The work of Miriam Toews is, like that of Louis’, marked by a desire for unaffected honesty, and a discomfort with literary fabrication.
‘I wanted my father to exist, and not someone as a metaphor.’
‘Who talks about us?’ he remembers thinking. He couldn’t comprehend why these concerns might be considered important when the deprivation in his own home was so stark. Teenage Édouard was baffled to hear this man describing creation of character and structure. Le Clézio won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2008, he saw the acceptance speech on television. Growing up in a brutally poor household in Northern France, there had never been any books in his home, but when J.M.G. Édouard Louis, speaking recently at the London Review Bookshop, described why he writes auto-fiction.
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