There’s a point in the book where Yolandi says to Elfrieda: ‘Now you have to fight,’ and Elfrieda says to Yoli, ‘I’ve been fighting for 30 years.’ That psych pain is as real as any physical pain, and it was manifesting itself as physical pain as well as psych pain. That she was saying she was competent, that she was suffering and that her suffering was profound. “I spent so much time with my sister during those months, during the months she had made these attempts, and I came to realize she was very, very serious.

It’s what I do.”īut it’s in the reality that Toews explores a major theme in the book: whether we should allow assisted suicide, as they do in Switzerland.

(But in fictionalizing it,) I can set the tone, the voice, the pace. “In writing fiction I can be free,” Toews explains. So why not just write a memoir, as she did about her father ( Swing Low: A Life)? There are parts of the book that are more fictional than others, it’s certainly fiction, but the major central relationship is informed by my life, by reality.”Īnd for years that reality centred on trying to prevent her beloved sister from committing suicide, as her father had done before her. “My sister attempted and finally succeeded in killing herself. “The relationship between Yolandi and Elfrieda is certainly taken from my own life, my relationship with my sister. The story of the love two sisters have for each other, even as one is repeatedly - spoiler alert - trying to commit suicide is “quite autobiographical,” Toews, winner of numerous literary awards for her earlier books including A Complicated Kindness explains in an interview on the eve of the book’s publication. As inarticulate and cliché as that may sound, it might be the best way to describe the devastatingly heartbreaking - and hilarious - story Miriam Toews tells in her new book, All My Puny Sorrows.Īnd that’s because the Torontonian isn’t making it up.

My puny sorrows book