You have an amazing natural fucking beauty that never seems to fade, and an amazing house that magically cleans itself…You have a mother who thinks the sun shines out of your ass.” “You have this amazing guy who loves your ass off, an amazing career that the whole world respects and gives you shitloads of cash for, plus you could quit at any time and just be labeled mysterious and eccentric and then go live in fucking Paris, in the Marais or wherever that stupid…fucking…arrondissement-No, don’t try talking, don’t correct me with your superior knowledge of French. In fact, while standing at her hospitalized sister’s bedside, trying mightily to understand the reasons for her sister’s despair, she becomes angry and lets loose: This harrowing fact causes Yoli to wonder if there is such a thing as a “suicide gene.” It’s a gripping question since, for all intents and purposes, Elf is living what appears to be a charmed and happy life. In this fictional rendering, however, art mimics life and readers learn that the patriarch of the Von Riesen clan jumped in front of an oncoming train to end his misery and torment. What’s more, the fact that Miriam Toews lost her only sister to suicide in 2010, a dozen years after their father took his life, makes the novel all the more poignant. by McSweeney’s in November and by Knopf Canada in April, and winner of Canada’s Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize and a finalist for the Giller and Governor General’s Prizes-chronicles Elf’s numerous hospitalizations and teases out what it means to be utterly inconsolable. All My Puny Sorrows-published in the U.S. Indeed, they were a mighty duo until Elf (as she is known to family and friends) developed a serious mental illness in her 40s that left her not only clinically depressed, but suicidal.

Together, the pair has spent decades exploring, gossiping, and testing the waters of adulthood and identity. Her sister Yolandi, six years her junior, and the protagonist of Miriam Toews’s new novel, has always been her confidante and accomplice. To her I poured forth all my puny sorrows.Īnd that’s exactly what Elfrieda has done. When Elfrieda Von Riesen was a teenaged misfit growing up in the tiny Mennonite community of East Village, Manitoba, she came upon a poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge that seemed as though it had been written expressly for her:

All my puny sorrows by miriam toews