A life in ...FictionInterviewMiriam Toews: ‘I worried people would think, what is wrong with this family?’
Interview by Alice O'KeeffeThe Canadian author of All My Puny Sorrows talks about growing up a Mennonite and how she managed to transform family tragedy into a novel suffused with joy
I meet Miriam Toews as she is awaiting the announcement of the Folio prize, for which her novel All My Puny Sorrows has been shortlisted. Neither of us is really expecting it to win (“Believe me, I know,” she says, breezily), and sure enough, later that evening the prize goes to Akhil Sharma for his quietly devastating Family Life. Her book was also shortlisted for the Wellcome prize, which on Wednesday went to Marion Coutts’s account of her husband’s terminal illness, The Iceberg.
But while All My Puny Sorrows, which is very funny, may not be a natural award-winner – prizes generally require books to be serious and literary, as if the two things were one and the same – it has captured the hearts of critics and readers alike this year, bringing its Canadian author a new level of recognition in Britain. And if there were a prize for joyfulness in fiction, Toews would win hands down for the near-miraculous feat of transforming suicide and grief into a narrative packed with laugh-out-loud delights.
It is the story of two sisters, Yolandi (Yoli), the chaotic middle-aged mother of two teenagers, and Elfrieda (Elf), a beautiful, talented, happily married concert pianist, who is nevertheless determined to kill herself. As Yoli says, “she wanted to die and I wanted her to live and we were enemies who loved each other”. As it becomes clear that Elf will achieve her wish at any cost, Yoli is forced to consider whether the most loving response would be to help her do so.
Toews (it’s pronounced taves, to rhyme with saves) has been open about the fact that the book is largely autobiographical. Her older sister, Marjorie, killed herself in 2010, having lived with severe depression for most of her life. Like their father, who had taken his own life almost exactly 12 years before, she threw herself under a train.
How do you even begin to carve humour and light out of this kind of tragedy? In the book, after the death of her father, Yoli recalls, “He had seventy-seven dollars on him at the time and we used the money for Thai takeout because, as my friend Julie says about times like this: You still have to eat.” For Toews, humour was always going to be an essential element of the story. “I wanted people to not be afraid of the subject matter,” she says, “to get the tone right, right off the top, and get the readers’ trust, so we could come out together in some other, less dark place.”
For this purpose, her upbringing prepared her exceptionally well: in a home blighted by mental illness, humour had always been her weapon. “With my father and sister being very depressed for most of their lives, it was incumbent on me to try to make them laugh, in this ridiculous way. They were the wittiest people I knew, but to get a smile from them was like winning the lottery.”
In the immediate aftermath of Marjorie’s death, Toews believed she would never be able to write about it. “I had no words. It took a couple of years before I thought, no, I’m a writer, this is what I do, take stuff and work it into something that makes sense to me.” The feeling must have been particularly acute because Marjorie had not only been her sister, but also her muse. Sisters have been central to most of Toews’s novels – from her breakthrough, A Complicated Kindness (2004), a blistering coming of age story set in the Canadian Mennonite community in which she grew up, to the tale of female emancipation, Irma Voth (2011), a novel that should be better known (“It’s my husband’s favourite, too! You’re like the only two people to have read it!”).
When Marjorie read The Flying Troutmans (2009), in which a younger sister sets out on a road trip with her troubled older sibling’s children, Toews recalls her saying, “‘It’s like a Valentine to me’… and it really was.” What was it about Marjorie that so captured her imagination? “I was so intrigued by her. She was older than me, she was different, dark, sophisticated, ‘in the world’ in a way that was fascinating,” she says. “She was very loving and supportive of me, but there was always something that I couldn’t quite reach.”
There was another motivating factor in writing All My Puny Sorrows: “I had so much anger towards the mental health system in Canada, the cruelty of it, the way patients are treated, infantilised, it almost seems criminalised. It was burning a hole in my heart and mind … I didn’t want this to be an ‘issue book’, but in a way it has become that, too.” Toews takes pains to make clear that there are some good people working in the psychiatric system, but the overall portrait painted in the book is damning. Elf is continually rebuked and punished for failing to “co-operate” with her treatment; staff are obsessed with enforcing rules (no mobile phones, no outside food) at the expense of even a modicum of human compassion; trying to meet the psychiatrist is “like trying to meet with the head of the Gambino family. I wasn’t sure he even existed.”
The reality, Toews says, was if anything worse. “I asked my mother before publication whether she thought I’d been too harsh – she said, no, you could have been far harsher,” she explains. “I didn’t want my rage to infect the tone.”
Her chief regret, she says, is that she didn’t help Marjorie die peacefully at Dignitas, as she had wished. “[She] begged me [to help her] and it just seemed – even though I believed her – I just couldn’t. But I regret it, absolutely. When I think about how she died – violently, alone – absolutely.”
There is criticism of my work, but with Mennonites, it’s not overt. Women whisper to me, ‘I am Nomi’ – that’s satisfyingMiriam ToewsThis is the only moment in the interview when Toews’ voice breaks. For the most part, she talks about the traumatic events in her life with complete openness and composure. Writing about them, she says, “gives me the impression of control over my scary thoughts”. She has been frequently asked whether working on the book was a therapeutic experience. “I never know how to answer that. Sure, I’m a writer; writing makes me feel good. But does closure come from writing a book like that? Does grief stop? Of course not.”
Is the book a sustained argument in favour of assisted dying? “It absolutely is.” Toews is delighted that in Canada the supreme court recently overturned the law that made it illegal to assist dying – and not only in cases of physical illness. Isn’t the danger, though, that it proves easier to introduce assisted suicide than it does to tackle the deep-seated failings of the psychiatric care system? Though Toews says she would like psychotherapy to be more widely available, she believes that in some cases we need to accept there is no cure. “There are people who are just suicidal, regardless. They are built to self-destruct,” she says. “It seems, in my family, like a virus that’s resistant to any kind of help or care or medication.”
A running theme in the book is the extent to which trauma is passed down through generations. Like Toews herself, Yoli and Elf are from a Mennonite family: Mennonites are similar to Amish, traditionally living in isolated, rural communities with restricted interaction with the outside world. The community in Canada is formed of families whose forebears fled persecution after the Russian revolution. “Do you think you’re still suffering from your grandparents being massacred in Russia?” Yoli asks a Mennonite friend. Perhaps “suffering, even though it may have happened a long time ago, is something that is passed from one generation to the next … like flexibility or grace or dyslexia.”
Toews’s extraordinary experiences growing up in a small Mennonite village form the backdrop to All My Puny Sorrows – as a teenager, Elf rebels against the restrictions of Mennonite life – but she drew on them more directly in her earlier books. A Complicated Kindness, which stars Nomi, a weed-smoking, Lou Reed-obsessed, shaven-headed teenager, gives readers an unusually intimate glimpse inside the bizarre world of religious fundamentalism. It describes a regime under which, for example, people are forced to “shun” or ostracise their own family members, who in some cases move into the garden shed and live on scraps of food. Was that all true? “Oh yeah, everybody’s got a story like that,” she says. “Although how shunning is implemented depends on the minister.”
The book, which won the Governor General’s Literary award in Canada, took aim at Mennonite hypocrisy with the same combination of rage and humour that All My Puny Sorrows directs at the psychiatric establishment. Indeed, with their portrayals of patriarchal attempts at control and their lack of compassion, the two share some characteristics. “I’ve always thought there are similarities. The language in the hospital reminded me of the church, for example the strange assumption of guilt on the part of the patient. ‘Oh, you didn’t stay out of trouble, you’re back in the hospital.’ ‘You didn’t take your medication or do what we told you to do and now you’re here again.’ Almost the assumption of some kind of weakness or guilt on the part of the patient for being in need, for being sick. And of course that’s the backbone of the Mennonite church – guilt, sin, obedience, staying out of trouble.”
Toews’s own family was “liberal and supportive of ideas and free thinking”, but she still left home as soon as she could, aged 18. She became a punk, travelled around Europe in a van, had children in her 20s, and now, in her early 50s, lives in Toronto. She says she still considers herself Mennonite. What have others in that community made of her work? “There is criticism, but with Mennonites, it’s not overt. More a kind of tight-lipped disapproval,” she says. “Funnily enough, even some conservative Mennonites have been supportive. They have said, OK, this is harsh, but we have to look at these things if we want to keep young people in our communities. Old Mennonite women will come up to me and whisper, ‘I am Nomi’ – that’s really satisfying.”
When her sister died, Toews says she hesitated to tell some people. “After my father, too, I felt people would think, what a fucked-up family, what is wrong with this family? Well, I also ask myself that.” But the book makes clear that serious levels of fucked-upness are not incompatible with almost limitless quantities of love. “Yes, there were serious issues, and there was tragedy, but there was a lot of love, all the time. And that goes on, even though my father and sister aren’t here. The love that I felt from them goes on.”
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