“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.
There are amusing stories of learning to embrace her role as the kooky grandmother to rapscallion grandchildren interspersed with clear-eyed observations about the sheer muscle it takes to care for her aging (and still delightfully sharp) mother ... Gorgeously written.
Creatively structured, gorgeously written, and flat-out astonishing ... The reader is whirlwinded by experiences bizarre, comedic, tragic, and wondrous.
