Miriam Toews’s novels are often described as tragicomedies, populated by war survivors, and set in or around Mennonite communities where Toews, too, grew up. In works such as All My Puny Sorrows, following the relationship of two sisters, and Women Talking, about cloistered women who gather in secret after a series of sexual assaults, she grapples with the humiliations of motherhood, the burdens of sisterhood, abuse, grief and suicide: a wound from her own life nursed throughout her work. Her novels are heart-wrenching and raw; all, in some way, about the drudging ordinariness of female pain, indignities from which she extracts tearful belly laughs. “To be alive,” she writes, “means full body contact with the absurd.”
Toews’s primary theme is the battles of women in a world of cruel men,…
