It’s just 7 am in Vancouver, B.C., but when author Miriam Toews picks up the phone in her hotel room – to discuss her new book, the story of her sister’s suicide – she is positively chipper.
“I’ve been thinking about the issue of suicide for so long,” she explained, referring to the new story, All My Puny Sorrows, as well as to the book she published about her father’s death – also from suicide – in 2000. “I enjoy talking about it because every time the dark subsides a little.”
Toews’ forthright attitude is supported by her trademark storytelling style: equal parts smart and funny even when the story is so tragic.
“I can’t address darker issues without humour in the work,” she said. “As I experience difficulty, it’s my response to the world. It’s the natural, organic direction I take – maybe genetic – my perspective and personality.”
The book, concerns the suffering of its characters as they circle around the narrator’s mentally ill sister, Elfrieda, a concert pianist. Within its stories of siblings, families and mental health are questions about what it means to love and truly help someone.
“What does suicide mean and what are we supposed to do?” Toews asked. “The book asks a lot of questions about this, as well as individual rights and social obligation.”
Although Toews admits that drawing literary inspiration from her own life helps her to process events and organize her thoughts, she refuses to call the experience “therapeutic.”
“Sure, sometimes it made me feel better, but it doesn’t work that way,” she said. “There is a weird subcategory of grief that emerges when we are sad about people who actually would want us to feel alright. All sorts of times I feel like I’m losing [my sister] again. But to do the work, you have to distance yourself from the emotions and the reality to focus on the narrative.”
While Toews the writer focused on the narrative in her Toronto home to survive the experience of losing her sister, the main character in the book, Yolandi, buoys herself by her mother, Lottie, a prairie Mennonite woman whose sense of humour never ceases, in spite of the pain she has suffered.
Even on her way to the hospital in an ambulance while experiencing heart trouble, the attending paramedic asks Lottie to repeat something hilarious she has said, just so he can tell his friends.
“My mother has suffered a lot of things,” explained Toews. “But nobody laughs harder than her.”
Authors Miriam Toews and Alexi Zentner
Thursday, May 8, 7:30 pm at Avening Hall
Tickets at Curiosity House or www.ticketscene.ca (adults $20, students $10)