“Why do you write?” the organizer of a literary event in Mexico City asks Miriam Toews. Each attempted answer from Toews-all of them unsatisfactory to the organizer-surfaces new layers of grief, guilt, and futility connected to her sister's suicide. She has been keeping up, she realizes, a decades-old internal correspondence, filling a silence she barely understands. And we, her readers, come to see that the question is as impossible to answer as deciding whether to live life as a comedy or a tragedy.
Discursive, revelatory ... As fluent in the comic register as it is in the tragic ... The book is less a linear narrative than a neat pile of shattered glass, one shard picked up at a time, in no discernible order.
A layered confrontation with the deaths, grief, and guilt that have animated her work for nearly 30 years, providing haunting insights on how to live after tragic loss ... Without the constraints of the novel—namely the need to advance a plot—Toews lets her mind loose on the page ... Discursive ... The reader bobs along in the author’s stream of consciousness, riding crests of despair, anger, and hilarity as Toews assembles the shards of her past to investigate her will to write, which is deeply entwined with her will to live.
The book’s six sections dip into their own unique content and themes that overlap and heighten the memoir as a whole ... Let’s not overlook the writing, the fine, fine writing. Lyrical yet plainspoken, vivid and rich. There is intimacy in what Toews is willing to share and in the way she chooses to share it. Reading this memoir is like reading a journal: private, surprising, and vulnerable.
