5/9/2023 0 Comments My puny little sorrowsSome early response to the book has focused on this aspect of the writing, with some quibbling over whether it would be better classified as a memoir. While Toews’ days as a writer struggling for recognition seem safely behind her at this point, the other details of this sketch do apply as equally to Toews as to her protagonist. The writer moves to Toronto to begin a new life there with her mother and daughter. The father, and later the older sister, commit suicide. The protagonist of this story, Yolandi Von Riesen, is a struggling writer, from a prairie, Mennonite background, with a school teacher father, and an older sister who is a gifted pianist. Toews herself has made no secret of the fact that the book is a direct response to her older sister Marjorie’s recent suicide (2010), and that of her father, twelve years earlier, and that many of the details of the story closely parallel the facts of her own life. It is all of these things but, also, something more. Much has already been said about Miriam Toews’ latest novel, All My Puny Sorrows - that it is searingly honest, unbearably sad, funny, extraordinarily personal and perhaps, for some, uncomfortably autobiographical. Newsflash: longlisted for the 2014 Scotiabank Giller Prize!
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