Miriam Toews’ hard-won fight for joy
Latest novel deals with three generations of family living and learning together
Miriam Toews is talking about her grandkids. At 57, the author of such powerful and popular books as “A Complicated Kindness” and “All My Puny Sorrows” now has four of them, spread between Toronto and Winnipeg.
Two of them live with Toews and her partner in Toronto in a multi-generational home along with Toews’ own mother, her daughter and her daughter’s partner.
“It’s just kind of a dream come true for me. I just love having everybody around,” she says. It’s good for her mother, Elvira, too, who’s now 90. “She loves it … and, you know, just having that massive life force around her, that’s great.”
This joy at grandmotherhood should not come as a surprise: if there’s anything a reader of Toews knows, it’s that family means everything to her and that her books reflect that.
There was a memoir of her father, “Swing Low: A Life”; he suffered from manic depression and took his own life. Her novel “All My Puny Sorrows” drew from the life of her sister, Marjorie, who also committed suicide. She won the Governor General’s Literary Award for her novel “A Complicated Kindness,” about a teenager in a Mennonite community in Manitoba. Interestingly, Toews also wrote letters to the father of her son in the “Open Letters” webzine — she didn’t know where to send them — signing them “X.”
“That was my central job, to get that voice and that line between joy and grief, between ebullience and exuberance and deep sadness.”
MIRIAM TOEWS
WRITER
Which is all to say, much of Toews’ work is drawn from her own well of rich experience: growing up in a Mennonite community, being a young single mother, experiencing the grief of her father’s and sister’s deaths.
The events come together again, from a new perspective, in her latest novel, “Fight Night,” a joyful, powerful, philosophical book. It’s very clearly set in Toronto and very clearly echoes her own life: three generations, a grandmother, pregnant daughter and her young daughter living together, learning about the joys and tragedies of life — and how to handle them — together.
“Fight Night” has at its heart the relationship between Swiv, nine, and her grandmother. Swiv has been expelled from school (she used a “lashing out tone” with her teacher) and her grandmother is attempting to teach her at home. The importance of language and writing are firmly established from the start; Swiv’s grandmother “says words are the embodiment of the soul.” The joy of language is established early, too, Swiv playfully flitting from phrase to phrase, capturing her own exuberance and her grandmother’s quirkiness.
“It was so fun to write Swiv,” Toews says. With the book dealing with themes of tension — absence and presence, anger and peace — she wanted to get it right. “That was my central job, to get that voice and that line between joy and grief, between ebullience and exuberance and deep sadness.”
The story begins as a letter that Swiv is writing to her dad, who is not in the picture. Her mom is quite pregnant with a baby they’ve nicknamed Gord; her grandmother “has one foot in the grave.” Which makes Swiv the narrator of this story.
It was at age nine, Toews says, that “a switch went off in my brain and suddenly I started thinking ‘What the heck is going on?’ ” In her own family. In her town. In the world around her. In her body. It was also a time, she says, when she was wondering about her father and her sister and what was wrong with them. It was a time of confusion.
She wanted Swiv to inhabit that same sort of territory: angry, freaked out, confused, terrified.
“I just thought that was a good tone to drive the narrative questions at the heart of it,” Toews says of this particular book.
Not only is Swiv writing a letter to her dad; her mother and grandmother are also assigned letters to write to Swiv and to Gord. Her grandmother’s advice to Gord: “You must learn to fight.”
Swiv’s mother, who is becoming increasingly frustrated and irritable as her pregnancy goes on, refers in her letter to Gord “as the story inside me.” It’s a profound affirmation of storytelling as a life force.
“I’ve been thinking a lot about writing lately,” Toews says. “I’ve written a lot, I’m getting older. And yet sometimes I feel maybe I’ve written enough. But then I think, but I can’t not write. I need to write to stay sane, very literally, to process things and to make sense of things.”
Whether words can save the world or make a difference is one of those age-old questions.
“There’s an ongoing duality, a conflict, really, of writing being absolutely necessary. It is a life force: I have to do it; I will do it. I live in fear of a day coming when I won’t be able to do it. And yet, at the same time, I can’t help but think of this kind of creeping meaninglessness or futility — words, they’re just words, you know — and yet, they’re everything to me.”
Swiv’s grandma, Elvira (also Toews’ mother’s name), is older and she’s not particularly well. There’s an undercurrent of what will happen at some point in the not too distant future. It’s a truth in the book, but also in Toews’ own life. Kids lose their grandparents and Toews wants her grandkids to know their great-grandmother.
“The brutal reality is that they’re not going to really know my mom unless she lives another 20 years. Like you say, it is our first death. We don’t have to keep it from our children, the fact that we get old, we get sick, we die. I think that, not so much in European culture but in North American culture, a lot of that is kept from and not talked about with our kids. I don’t think it needs to be that way.”
It’s something she was familiar with as a child, in Mennonite culture. Her mother was the youngest of 13 children, so all of her mom’s brothers and sisters have died now. And when Toews was growing up, going to a funeral was a social event. They were always open casket, she remembers. “Kids would go and touch the deceased person and say goodbye,” she says. “We were familiar with death. That doesn’t make it easy, but it certainly makes it less of a terrifying thing.”
There are so many legacies we inherit from family. We can inherit mental illness, for example. But we can also inherit the way our families coped with things, their views on life, their philosophies. There’s a legacy in that.
“I wanted to write something that would not shy away from the dark part of a person’s life, and not just my family’s life or my life, but life in general,” she says.
“We’re gonna suffer and we’re gonna suffer hard, and I wanted to write about this idea of fighting and the idea that joy is resistance.”
But we also inherit the stories. If we’re lucky, we have someone who’ll record them,
“When they were born, I realized these kids, they’re gonna have questions about their family,” Toews says about her grandchildren. “We’ve had a lot of trauma in our family and they’re gonna want to know: who are these people who suffered, who killed themselves … who they’re named after?”
She refers to her mother, Elvira, again and the “rock” she’s been in her family’s life. “She continues to teach us how to live with resilience and courage, and compassion to spread that joy.”
“She goes to these dark places, she’s lived it,” Toews says.
“I wanted the book to be encouraging. I wanted it to be funny. I wanted to make my kids my grandkids laugh, that’s for sure.”
And her readers, too. At least she hopes so — “funny is subjective.” Toews has her own brand of humour, to be sure, a quirky voice that is familiar, as it was in “All My Puny Sorrows.” For all of the grief in that book, it was leavened with humour.
In “Fight Night,” there’s a wonderful bit where Elvira is telling Swiv a story set in Manitoba, where she passes a grandmother walking in a blizzard with her two grandsons in minus 30-degree weather eating popsicles. And they were still smiling. While it has a tinge of the “I had to walk five miles to school in the snow” about it, there’s a wistfulness and wisdom in there.
For all that Toronto’s home and she loves it here, Toews says, she always thinks about Manitoba, about the Prairies. And that’s where Grandma remembers.
There’s an understanding in Toews’ work that suffering is part of the human condition. That doesn’t mean it’s the totality of the human condition. There is compassion and courage and joy.
“If we can experience joy and spread joy that is resistance, that is the fight,” Toews says.
It is also, she says, a survival tool, something she was hoping would come across in the narrative.
“For my family it’s the most important survival tool,” she says. “Of course, we need to be aware of so many things, and to understand the pain and the suffering, not only of ourselves, but others. There are times when joy is a difficult emotion to muster.”
While life can be and is hard, and we all face tragedy at some point or other, what becomes obvious in “Fight Night” is that love wins out over everything.
“I might have flippantly tossed off when I was 18 or 19 a vaguely hippie kind of thing, ‘Love is the answer, man. The older I get, you know, it’s the truth.”