In all my work, I'm always kicking against the man, the patriarchy. Through all the generations: what does it mean to be a woman of Grandma's age and Mom's age and (the daughter's) age?
Miriam Toews, author of Fight Night
Humour and jokes and laughter can be the kind of thing that is weaponized in a sense, but also it's just purely survival.
There's comedy in the world ... It's a very funny place. It's a tragic, dark horrifying place, but it's also very funny. Miriam Toews
There are currently four generations living in Miriam Toews's Toronto home.
It got so crowded that construction is now nearly complete on a so-called laneway house on the property, a small dwelling built in the back for the author and her partner, Erik Rutherford.
“My daughter and her husband and their two kids live upstairs and my mother lives downstairs on the main floor,” Toews says in an interview with Postmedia from Toronto. “And Erik and I are outside in the backyard,”
Toews has often drawn from her own life for her fiction, whether directly or obliquely. So it's probably safe to assume that this multi-generational, crowded-house dynamic offered inspiration for her ninth book, Fight Night (out Aug. 24), which tells the story of the interactions between nine-year-old Swiv, her pregnant mother and elderly grandmother, who are all living together in a Toronto house.
The story is mostly told through the point of view of Swiv, who is both devoted to and exasperated by her free-spirited, sports-loving grandmother — directly inspired by Toews's own mother, Elvira.
After Swiv is suspended from school for fighting, Grandma haphazardly takes charge of her education. One of Swiv's assignments is to write a letter to her father — who has abandoned the family — about living with a pregnant mom and wild-card grandma. In turn, Swiv instructs her grandmother to write a letter to her unborn grandchild, who the family has taken to calling Gord even though they don't know if it's a boy or a girl.
Grandma's key advice for young Gord? “You're a small thing and you must learn to fight.”
It hints at a troubled past and we eventually learn that both Swiv's grandmother and mother have endured terrible loss and tragedy but tend to confront the darkness of their pasts in different ways. Grandma is almost giddy with an uncompromising, defiant joie de vivre. Swiv's mother is a frustrated actress full of anxiety and unfocused anger. But most of the story is told in Swiv's unique voice through those letters to her absent father, offering a funny and endearing young narrator who is often mortified by her mother and grandmother's public outbursts, but also feels a deep responsibility toward them and is terrified for their health and future.
She worries that her mother is losing her mind. She worries that her grandmother will die. She worries that she will be left alone.
Toews says she began developing the broad strokes of the novel when her own grandchildren were born.
“I started thinking about the things they'll face and questions they'll have,” Toews says. “I thought about the people they are related to who aren't around that they'll want to know about. I wanted to explore that idea of writing a character like my mother, Elvira, the grandma character who has become such a presence in my family's lives. But she's 86 and my grandchildren, who are very young, aren't going to really know her. There was this idea of `What does it take to survive in this world?' using a little bit of my own experience, my family's experience and background.”
Ever since her breakthrough third novel, 2004's A Complicated Kindness, the autobiographical leanings of Toews's work have been a source of fascination and occasional controversy for the author. That book was about a teenager yearning for escape from a Mennonite community, which seemed to reflect the author's own background growing up in Steinbach, Man. Novels such as Irma Voth (2011) and the often harrowing Women Talking (2018) were set in strict Mennonite colonies. Fight Night is not as direct, but it does explore the grandmother's past in a controlling, religious culture that she rebelled against and eventually escaped. Her focus has occasionally earned her criticism, particularly in the more conservative circles of the Mennonite community.
“In all my work, I'm always kicking against the man, the patriarchy,” says Toews with a laugh. “Through all the generations: what does it mean to be a woman of Grandma's age and Mom's age and Swiv's age?”
Another hallmark of Toews's work is the idea of absent family members. The characters in Fight Night are dealing with devastating loss that slowly comes into focus through Swiv and grandma's narration.
This echoes a central element of All My Puny Sorrows, Toews's 2014 novel about a writer whose gifted sister is determined to commit suicide.
Toews's sister Marjorie suffered from mental illness her whole life and died from suicide in 2010. Toews's only non-fiction work, 2000's memoir Swing Low: A Life, told the story of her father. He took his own life in 1998.
While Toews says she doesn't set out to include these elements in her work as a way to process her own grief, she admits there is a certain catharsis in having it be part of her fictional world. It's a way of taking “what's inside and putting it in places outside of you that are more easily managed.”
“It's not the cure,” she says. “But it does help in moving forward in life. There is this real fear when you have this kind of mental illness in your family, and so many families do. In my family too, with generational suicide and hereditary mental illness, it is a question. It is a thing that can haunt you a little bit. Is this going to happen to me? Will this happen to me, will this happen to my children and, now, will it happen to my grandchildren? What will they want to know? Because eventually they are
going to get old enough and they are going to say `Who are these people?' And you are going to have to tell them. How would that make you feel when you're a kid and you hear that?”
The danger of discussing Toews's work through brief plot synopses is that it can start to sound unrelentingly grim. It isn't. There are few authors as adept at comedy as Toews.
As with Irma Voth and Toews's tragicomic novel The Flying Troutmans (2008), there is a freewheeling family trip at the heart of Fight Night as Grandma decides to travel to Fresno to visit her nephews. Her daughter insists she bring Swiv along as her caregiver and they eventually encounter madcap adventures and the kindness of strangers while forming tender family bonds. As our often exasperated young protagonist, Swiv's observations can be both astute and hilariously over-the-top, with Toews perfectly capturing the voice of a wise-beyond-her-years nine-year-old who is nevertheless prone to fits of catastrophic thinking.
There is even some laugh-outloud slapstick in the book.
“There's laughter in life,” Toews says. “Humour and jokes and laughter can be the kind of thing that is weaponized in a sense, but also it's just purely survival. There's comedy in the world. It's my outlook. It's how I see the world. It's a very funny place. It's a tragic, dark horrifying place, but it's also very funny.
“If I'm representing life or writing as honestly as I can, then definitely that is part of it. I just see the two always going hand in hand: The darkness and the light, inextricably.”
There is this real fear when you have this kind of mental illness in your family ... It is a thing that can haunt you a little bit.
Is this going to happen to me?