Pine and Sparkle in the Moonlight: On Rhythm and Grace in Miriam Toews
One of my recurring memories of my mother, Trudie Nickel, has to do with the killing of fowl. She and I were standing in this farmyard watching Carson and his dad chop heads off chickens. You’d know Carson if you saw him. Carson Enns. Arm-farter in the back row. President of the Pervert Club. Says he’s got a kid in Pansy, a small town south of here. Troubled boy, but that’s no wonder considering he used to be The Snowmobile Suit Killer. I was eight and Trudie was about thirty-five. She was wearing a red wool coat and moon boots. The ends of her hair were frozen because she hadn’t been able to find the blow-dryer that morning. Look, she’d said. She grabbed a strand of hair and bent it like a straw. She’d given me her paisley scarf to tie around my ears. I don’t know exactly what we were doing at Carson’s place in the midst of all that carnage, it hadn’t started out that way I’m pretty sure, but I guess carnage has a way of creeping up on you. Carson was my age and every time he swung the axe he’d yell things at the chicken. He wanted it to escape. Run, you stupid chicken! Carson, his dad would say. Just his name and a slight anal shake of the head. He was doing his best to nurture the killer in his son. It was around 4:30 in the afternoon on a winter day and the light was fading into blue and it was snowing horizontally and we were all standing under a huge yellow yard light. Well, some of us were dying. And Carson was doing this awful botch job on a chicken, hacking away at its neck, not doing it right at all, whispering instructions on how to escape. Fly away, idiot. Don’t make me do this. Poor kid. By this time he’d unzipped the top half of his snowmobile suit so it kind of flapped around his waist like a skirt, slowing him down, and his dad saw him and came over and grabbed the semi-mutilated chicken out of Carson’s little mittened hand and slapped it onto this wooden altar thing he used to do the killing and brought his axe down with incredible speed and accuracy and in less than a second had created a splattery painting in the snow and I was blown away by how the blood could land so fast and without a single sound and my mom gasped and said look, Nomi, it’s a Jackson Pollock. Oh, it’s beautiful. Oh, she said, cloths of heaven. That was something she said a lot. And Carson and I stood there staring at the blood on the snow and my mom said: Just like that. Who knew it could be so easy.
— from A Complicated Kindness
RHYTHM
Of all that makes the prose of Miriam Toews intoxicating, I’d argue the basic building block of her talent is in her rhythm: her writing consists solely of plain, intimate speech (seven out of her eight books are told in first person by a single narrator) that achieves a simple and engrossing conversational stew.
Take this passage from the middle of 2004’s A Complicated Kindness, which comes after an extended spurt of wry, sardonic recollection about the narrator’s rebellious older sister, who years ago left town.
It may have been the light at 5:36 on a June evening or it may have been the smell of dust combined with sprinkler water or the sound of the neighbour kid screaming I'll kill you but suddenly it was like I was dying, the way I missed her. Like I was swooning, like I was going to fall over and pass out. It was like being shot in the back. It was such a surprise, but not a very good one. And then it went away. The way it does. But it exhausted me, like a seizure.
This paragraph seems so natural and unadorned, like something anybody could say. But let’s take away, say, “at 5:36”, “the sound of the neighbour kid screaming I’ll kill you,” and “The way it does.”
It may have been the light on a June evening or it may have been the smell of dust combined with sprinkler water but suddenly it was like I was dying, the way I missed her. Like I was swooning, like I was going to fall over and pass out. It was like being shot in the back. It was such a surprise, but not a very good one. And then it went away. But it exhausted me, like a seizure.
Functionally, the paragraph communicates the same thing: I miss someone so much that it’s everything. But rhythmically, emotionally, it’s a less impactful piece of writing.
It’s so difficult, in fiction writing, to attain unique internal rhythms that still yield a readable product. By internal rhythm I mean the emotional cadences of how one’s soul travels through a story. How the heart proceeds through a single paragraph or page, in the way of small oceans. And then it went away. The way it does.
Toews succeeds in this consistently. In her novels, she acts as a storyteller-writer in the purest way, the authorial version of someone sitting in an easy chair who knows just the right number of pauses, digressions, and punctuation marks to add to a tale.
Let’s take the epigraph at the beginning of this essay, where Nomi and her mom watch Carson Enns try to kill a chicken. It’s a single paragraph, taking up almost exactly a page in the printed book, but it houses an entire three-act story. I love many things about this passage, but especially its ending: The disappearance of commas leading up to the death of the chicken (you can hear the tempo increasing in urgency) and the musicality of Trudie’s last two sentences, a half-note/quarter-rest/whole-note that ends the final measures. “Just like that. Who knew it could be so easy.”
But the line that particularly sticks with me arrives buried in the middle: He was doing his best to nurture the killer in his son. In twelve simple words, it signals the cruelty of the community we’re about to meet, and particularly how its men are taught to be from a very young age. But its reverberation has full power only because it comes at exactly the right time. Imagine this thought elsewhere in the paragraph, say, when the chicken is just about to die: “his dad saw him and came over and grabbed the semi-mutilated chicken out of Carson’s little mittened hand and slapped it onto this wooden altar thing he used to do the killing. He was doing his best to nurture the killer in his son.” Or the beginning: “She and I were standing in this farmyard watching Carson and his dad chop heads off chickens. He was doing his best to nurture the killer in his son.”
If Toews were a singer the similarity in vocal tenor would be unmistakable.
Logistically the line would be doing the same amount of work, in the same scene, on the same page. But the line wouldn’t have the same impact. As it is, the thought of the line arrives at the reader just as we’re watching a boy run around in fear, twinning the image with the thought. The reader lingers on it as the boy’s snowsuit comes apart and throughout the entirety of his father taking the action and enacting the killing himself. By the time the blood spatters, the twinning of the thought “doing his best to nurture the killer” with the image of the frightened boy with a flapping snowsuit is already a part of the story’s DNA, murkily blended into its bloodstream—as Trudie’s dark and dreamy exclamations lead us to the paragraph’s conclusion. Just like that. Who knew it could be so easy.
Stephen Finucan is one of the few critics of Toews’ work to have remarked specifically on her rhythm, as he did in his review of her novel Irma Voth in the Toronto Star: “There is something quite mesmerizing about Toews’ prose. It’s to do with the rhythm of her language, with the seeming effortlessness of it and, when combined with her quick, offhand wit, it can enliven even the darkest of moments.”
Seemingly effortless, indeed. But of course, this isn’t effortlessness but a product of Toews’ attention to her craft (I realize Finucan would almost certainly agree). Particularly illuminating on this front is Toews’ first novel, Summer of My Amazing Luck, her 1996 debut about an eighteen-year-old single mom, Lucy, living in public housing with her zany best friend. A paragraph from the first section of the book, where Lucy is reminiscing about her estranged father:
My dad never cooked for himself. He ate all his meals at The Waffle Shop or at the Pizza Hut. When I was a kid he’d take me to The Waffle Shop. We would walk there holding hands. Well, it was more like me flying behind him like a kite because he was a huge man and covered the ground with enormous quick strides. My dad had this weird talent. He could pick out four-leafed clovers in the grass. One four-legged clover surrounded by thousands of regular three-leafed ones and grass and stuff and he’d see it. Every once in a while that would happen on our way to The Waffle Shop and he’d stop and home in on the thing and then point it out to me, but that was it. He never picked them and I never asked him how he did it and he never told me. It was very strange. I remember telling my grade two class that my dad could do this weird thing with four-leaf clovers and they were not impressed. A boy got up and said his dad could crow like a rooster and they were impressed. Then I told them, well, my dad was the only baby ever in the world to be born wearing a little grey suit. I had overheard my mother tell this to one of her friends on the phone. They were not impressed and my teacher asked me to please sit down.
Compare that to Carson Enns and Trudie’s moon boots. Trudie saying “Oh, cloths of heaven.” He was doing his best to nurture the killer in his son. If Toews were a singer the similarity in vocal tenor would be unmistakable. Yet, the raw emotional power and verbal ease of the Complicated Kindness paragraph is so night and day from that of Summer. To read Summer with a knowledge of her other work, you can almost feel the debut novelist trying to get into her groove, develop her knack, and figure out how to use what it’s in her toolbox.
The rhythm becomes a little stronger and more affecting in A Boy of Good Breeding, her charming and gentle 1998 novel about a single mother, Knute, returning to her hometown to take care of her dad while the town’s dorky mayor, Hosea, desperately tries to keep the town’s population level at the minimum possible to achieve national acclaim and a visit from the Prime Minister (really). Also he has love problems.
Hosea hated lying around and talking after having sex. He preferred to go outside, flushed and happy, and feel the earth and the sky, and himself sandwiched between them, and know that as things go in the universe, he had just been blessed. But he knew from experience this was not Lorna’s first choice. One time he had dragged her outside in the dark, naked and sweaty, and she had started to cough and complain about mosquitos, and had not said she felt blessed when Hosea had asked her. And so this time he decided he would just get up and get that Emmylou Harris song playing, finally.
Boy is a chronically underrated book, in my opinion, and a personal go-to for a solid literary novel that is not sad or depressing. The made-up town of Algren, Manitoba, devoid of Mennonites and filled with quirky, largely unsinister characters, sometimes makes me wonder if it’s a wishful fictional portrait—a small town that doesn’t exist that Toews wished she could have grown up in instead.
This free-wheeling voice runs through all these novels, as fluid and unadorned as prairie wind.
But with a detour into non-fiction with 2000’s Swing Low: A Life (more on that in a bit) by the time she gets to A Complicated Kindness, Toews has fully hit her rhythmic stride as a novelist. That same devastating and plain-spoken musicality shows up again in 2008’s The Flying Troutmans, 2011’s Irma Voth, and 2014’s All My Puny Sorrows, all with the same kind of ladies at the narrator’s helm as Summer and Boy. Desperate hilarious young women figuring out how to take care of the people they love, made alive to the reader. “I noticed that he had silver and gold glitter on his face and in his hair. Were you guys doing crafts in there? I asked.” Hattie, from The Flying Troutmans, is talking about her fifteen-year-old nephew, who she’s just discovered making out with a strange girl in their mini-van, as they search for the nephew’s lost father. Hattie continues: “He looked away, toward Saturn, or farther up, maybe towards some satellite that only he could see. I liked the silver and gold specks. They softened him up. He looked like a sweet, kind of gay, raver alien waiting for his crew to take him back to space, to some benevolent planet that partied hard but happily. I left him to pine and sparkle in the moonlight.” This free-wheeling voice runs through all these novels, as fluid and unadorned as prairie wind.
And then there’s her two other books, Swing Low and this year’s novel, Women Talking, both of whose authorial cadences could not be more different.
In some ways, Swing Low and Women Talking are very different stories. Swing Low is a memoir about Toews’ father, Mel, and told from his point of view. Mel was a Mennonite schoolteacher from Steinbach, Manitoba, who raised his family there and who died by suicide in his sixties. Women Talking is a novel about a South American Mennonite community named Molotschna (based on the real-life Manitoba Colony of Bolivia) whose women have suffered mass sexual violence and are strategizing a response against great odds—obediently narrated by August Epp, a sweet, anxious man who was once ex-communicated as a youth but came back to the colony after surviving a violent prison sentence over in England.
But Mel and August are so incredibly alike. Earlier this year I wrote in a review for Women Talking, “Mel feels like a similar narrator to August, with their slower cadences and teacher sensibilities. Both are peaceful men among unpeaceful men.” And indeed, Toews herself has said that August was inspired by her father. Compare how alike the following passages feel and contrast them with those of the aforementioned novels.
August in Women Talking:
She will be the one to look up to the sky, I thought. That is why the pig in her dream had her pinned against the wall. But then I thought, how could that be? How could my interpretation of Ona’s dream be accurate when Ona wasn’t aware, consciously or not, of the physical limitations of pigs? In my jail cell (Wandsworth Prison) in England, my cellmates and I would play games. “What Would You Prefer” was the name of my favourite game. Knowing you were about to die, would you prefer one year, one day, one minute or no time at all to live with that knowledge? The answer is: None of the above. In jail I once made the mistake of telling my cellmates that the sound of a duck (and also the sight of its round, flat bill) made me happy and provided consolation. There are crimes. And then there are crimes. I have since learned to keep most of my thoughts to myself.
Mel in Swing Low:
In bad periods of [my mother's] drinking, she would flail about punching and kicking at the empty air around her, shrieking, in a little girl's voice, the names of various men in the community. Men who are long dead. When my daughter asked her, as an old woman, what she had liked best about her husband, my father, she replied: He was so very gentle.
There’s no mistaking how intrinsic the gendered difference is here, between the female-narrated group of six books and the male-narrated group of two. It makes sense. Beyond just Mel and August, there are so often singular, sweet men trying to be good in Toews’ books, sacrificing (if some more than others), among her raging broken women—Ray in A Complicated Kindness, Max in A Boy of Good Breeding, Cherkis in The Flying Troutmans, Nic in All My Puny Sorrows. Men and women who face something immovable.
QUIET
“Lots of silence,” my mother said when my grandfather stopped e-mailing me after I transitioned. “About lots of things.” Of his new wife’s reaction to my news, only one person, who’d herself married into the family, eventually passed on any part of this to me: “God doesn’t make mistakes,” my grandfather’s wife had said, though we’ve since re-united.
Having moved away from Southern Manitoba when I was eleven, coming of age in a secular college town in the United States far away from any Mennonites, I learned (at least partially) how to interpret my own family’s actions and history through the books of Miriam Toews. And so while her narrators often are sharp-tongued and loud, I’m continuously struck by her portrayal of obfuscation, of quiet, of silence.
In Swing Low, teenaged Mel is fresh out of a period of hospitalization after a depressive episode. When he comes home, his brother informs Mel he’s in deep trouble, but Mel doesn’t know why:
I assumed that my brother had only been trying to frighten me with his comment. Later, however, my father asked me to come into the little room where he balanced his books. So …, he said in Low German, when you were at the hospital you mentioned to your doctor that Mother … His voice trailed off. I didn’t know what he was referring to, so I cocked my head and waited for him to finish. He removed his glasses and placed them carefully on his desk. Then, with both hands, he began to rub his brow and temples and cheeks, and almost every other part of his face and neck. I noticed how tired he was, how tired he had always been. That Mother …, I reminded him gently. But just as I said the words, it struck me. Of course, I thought, this was about her drinking. The doctor, who was really a psychiatrist from Winnipeg, and who may not have been aware of the implications of a small-town confession…
The father doesn’t even need to say the word nor raise his voice. The next line of conversation finds Mel whispering “I’m sorry.”
Another father-child interaction, from A Complicated Kindness: Nomi and her father Ray often charmingly communicate in notes they leave for each other on the kitchen table. Ray as a character is unfailingly gracious, kind, and considerate, even as Nomi grows snappy and rebellious. At one point, towards the end of the book, her father brings up that she’s failing grade twelve. Nomi broodily retorts “No, they have it turned around,” then goes into her room and slams the door.
Toews’ way of showing us that Nomi feels remorse about this comes the next morning: “I left a note for my dad: Don’t you think we should fix the window? I’ll go to school tomorrow. Who was Samuel Champlain again? xoxo nomi. I liked to ask my dad questions about Canadian history because it made him happy to talk about it.”
Her dad’s response in the next note: You know who Samuel Champlain is.
This is, like, Ray’s way of saying he’s pissed off.
(Side-note: Champlain’s awful legacy concerning Indigenous peoples is almost certainly not, in the world of the book, among what Ray is implying Nomi knows.)
Too, this simple interaction between father and daughter also opens up the one time they ever talk about why Nomi’s mom—Ray’s wife—left town after she was excommunicated by the church, which would’ve mandated shunning from the whole town and her family. Nomi’s next note to her dad: One other question. Why didn’t she take me with her? Ray writes back the next morning: She didn’t take you with her because you were sleeping when she left.
Finally. Hmmm, Nomi thinks.
I guess he meant that I had stopped believing in hell and was no longer having nightmares. Maybe. Hard to say. I think I knew another part of the answer which was that she knew he needed me more than she did. I’m pretty sure she left town for his sake. It would have killed him to choose between her or the church. The only decision he’d ever made without her help was to wear a suit and tie every day of his life. How could he stand up and publicly denounce a woman he loved more than anything in the world. And how could he turn away from the church that could, someday, forgive his wife and secure their future together in paradise, for all time.
The shrouded interaction of the note—the one conversation they ever have, in essence, about this traumatic loss in their lives—ends up providing insight and wisdom about a family secret. What also strikes me about the passage is that Nomi has no comment about the secretive, indirect nature of the exchange, though throughout the novel she’s got a limitless well of snark and zingers for both her dad’s benevolent eccentricities and the town’s repressive mandates.
In the 1920s, my great-grandfather and his eight siblings somehow got their hands on a beer-making device. They hid it in the basement of their grandparents, who were not well-sighted and never went down there. Whenever they needed beer, someone would fake sick on a Sunday morning, the only time where the community would be wholly occupied and not missed them. They all made a pact that they would never tell another soul, and also, when each sibling got married, there’d be a keg behind the granary. Eventually they grew up, became serious church members, left behind worldly and sinful things like beer-making. We only found out about this in 2002, when the last of the siblings, my great-great-uncle, was on his deathbed. Everyone else had gone and so he decided, well, it was okay to let it out now. I’m telling you this story, so light-hearted for me to think about in 2018, because that’s how long they kept the secret. They weren’t lying when they made a vow.
My life as a transsexual connected to a Mennonite family has had its difficult periods, and also has been much better than what I expected to get when I came out. So rather than list another moment of pain; a memory of sweetness: When I returned to Manitoba as an adult in my mid-twenties, there for the first time since the lady pills, I went to an aunt and uncle’s for dinner. As they were getting the food ready, another aunt of mine came through the door, one of the most religious people in my family, a kindergarten teacher whose floor I slept on countless nights before my mom’s upward mobility. Before even saying hello or welcome here or taking off her coat she smiled a deep smile and said: “You look just like your mother. You look just like her.”
BREAKING POINTS
“Inside, probably, our internal organs were chipping off and turning grey. But we never screamed,” Nomi says about her and her father, living in the wake of her sister and mother’s disappearance. It’s a statement that every protagonist of her books, all eight, would likely identify with.
But they do always end up screaming, in some fashion or another. All Toews protagonists generally face their overwhelming situations with stoicism and gentility, and there’s almost always a point where they lose their shit, whether to productive or destructive ends. In Summer, Lucy’s broken stroller breaks one final time in the mall (“I CAN’T FUCKING STAND THIS FUCKING FUCKING PIECE OF FUCKING SHIT NO MORE!”) and she throws it into the fountain then steals a new one. In Boy, Knute discovers her ex Max, who she’d warily taken back, talking with who she assumes is a lover on the phone. She shrieks “What are you doing, you fucking asshole?” and throws the phone at him. In Irma Voth, the eponymous narrator takes off with her pregnant sister, financing her flight by stealing huge amounts of hidden contraband from her husband and offloading it on his friend (“Irma, he said. I don’t mean to pry but what are you doing.” “I’m selling drugs! I said. Jesus Christ, man. What the hell do you think I’m doing!”)
Yoli flips out on her sister Elf for nearly two good pages in Puny Sorrows as she—Elf, that is—lies in a hospital bed days after a suicide attempt. (“You have a very low-grade understanding of despair,” Elf replies.) Even Mel, unfailingly placid toward others, has his one moment of retaliation when a screaming parent over the phone will not stop berating him: “I don’t tell you how much salt to put on your potatoes and you don’t tell me how to teach school!” he eventually retorts and hangs up. And finally, in A Complicated Kindness, Nomi responds to her boyfriend’s infidelity by, uh, setting his truck on fire.
That August in Women Talking doesn’t go off at least once is an indicator, I think, of how much that book is a departure for her. Hattie in Troutmans never flips out though. I guess she yells at her niece Thebes once but even then she immediately apologizes after. I don’t know what to make of that outlier.
GRACE
The discourse surrounding the religiosity and small-town-ness of Miriam Toews’ work is often flattened (God BAD, cities GOOD). Though in the Mennonite literary world—if not the wider Mennonite community—nuance certainly abounds, as any attendee of the Mennonite/s Writing conferences could tell you.
But as much as Toews unflinchingly chronicles the murderous effects of these cruel systems, there are grains of hope about them at the end of nearly every book, tiny beliefs in the possibilities that they could have been better, that there was something small and good that maybe could’ve been made right. Even A Boy of Good Breeding and Women Talking, dimorphous tonal opposites in her oeuvre, both explore what it’s like to return to the tiny community you grew up in, with the attempt to stay for good. Yoli in All My Puny Sorrows doesn’t believe in God anymore but she writes a letter to her dead sister anyway, and the book closes imagining her making different choices, taking Elf to Switzerland to die like she wanted. I don’t know if it’s good for Yoli’s being, I don’t know what her takeaway is—the novel ends within her imagination—but it’s such a powerful, heartbreaking moment, the only piece of fiction that’s ever made me ugly-cry, like with the snot-horking and the wailing and stuff.
But it’s A Complicated Kindness, her landmark novel raging against small-town Manitoba Mennonite life, that is to me about faith, faith with a capital F.
I wrote in my review of Women Talking that Toews’ books end with a consideration of how faith might last even when religion fails. A Complicated Kindness ends with teenaged Nomi on her front lawn possessing a car and a house but completely alone. Her father Ray has just left town. She considers, maybe, that Ray has also killed himself, is lying at the bottom of the Rat River where, it’s strongly implied, she thinks her mother likely is. Nomi also understands, regardless, why he left.
…the neighbour kid rolled over in the grass and put her arm around me and rubbed my bald head and I whispered thank you. I meant thank you to Ray for, in the midst of his own multitude of crap and bewilderment, knowing one true thing. That I would never have left him and that if I were ever to get out of that town, he would have to leave first. That’s two things, I heard him say. And the neighbour kid said you’re welcome, because she was a polite kid and thought I was talking to her. She was a good kid. We were all good kids. Amen. And then it was time for me to leave and for her to go home.
What to talk about the appeal and trauma of beloved, harmful communities that shelter, police, and repel? Ever since Toews first tackled the Mennonite thing eighteen years ago with Swing Low, all of her books have grappled with this question, all of them (with that exception once again of Troutmans) with a fundamentalist Mennonite upbringing at the characters’ center.
That was decades ago! The town’s changed now! Of course it has. Of course it hasn’t.
Someone in my family, who grew up minutes away from Steinbach and left the area and the church in her early twenties, who I’m very close to and have loved all my life, said to me when I transitioned “When they hear about you they will finally know that I am garbage.” They being the people she grew up with, a town of under a thousand, a little hamlet on the prairie she hadn’t lived in since the ‘80s. They were still on her mind.
“That’s the way the town used to be,” said a different relative about A Complicated Kindness and Swing Low, many years ago. He was a sixty-ish man born and raised around Steinbach, where he still lives. This man and his wife are liberal for the area—and they are joyous, kind religious people, the only branch on that side of the family who didn’t take years to acknowledge my transition, for starters. They were part of a book club that had read those two Toews books (Puny Sorrows, the other Toews book chronicling the town, hadn’t come out yet.) “Steinbach’s not like that anymore,” he said. This is an underlying implication I’ve heard from a few Mennonites from Southern Manitoba who have a bone to pick with Toews’ writing. That was decades ago! The town’s changed now!
Of course it has. Of course it hasn’t.
Six years after I had this conversation, I was driving through Northern Ontario to go to the funeral of the father of that same man. My phone rang north of Sault Ste. Marie and it was another family member: “I don’t think it’s a good idea for you to come.” I didn’t. Instead I traveled to the cemetery days later, alone but for my partner in tow, to lay flowers by the headstone and say a prayer.
Nomi again:
Had my dad really gone to pick garbage off mountains or was he also at the bottom of the Rat—no, I preferred the first story, the one about sacrifice and pain, because it presented opportunities, of being reunited, of being happy again, somewhere in the real world, our family, and because it was about everlasting love and that’s what I like to believe in. The stories that I have told myself are bleeding into a dream, finally, that is slowly coming true. I’ve learned, from living in this town, that stories are what matter, and that if we can believe them, I mean really believe them, we have a chance at redemption.
Read that paragraph over again. Its rhythm, its quiet—its having taken place about two days after its speaker torched her ex-boyfriend’s truck into a fireball—all undergird its gravity, strength, and beauty.
But then, read both Swing Low and A Complicated Kindness in that order. You’ll notice that in the former—again, a work of non-fiction—Toews’ dad Mel puts notes in his shoes the next day to remind him what to do, like the fictional dad Ray does in the book following. Before Mel died, one of the last things he wrote was “Develop new life strategy.” In A Complicated Kindness, Nomi finds a note with this exact wording in Ray’s shoes just before he leaves.
That Nomi believes her dad’s still alive, that she decides that Ray’s picking garbage off mountains, that her oppressive town taught her how to believe in a story hard enough for it to be real—that’s Nomi finding a version of faith. A Complicated Kindness is generally understood to have ended with this poor girl’s family completely destroyed, but when you read it back-to-back with the previous memoir, I find it impossible not to think Toews is writing a more hopeful ending for Nomi against all odds, an ending that Nomi is able to choose, an ending rife with unknown possibility that the author’s own family wasn’t given.
They’re the starkest example, Nomi and Ray. But all her books contain those other possibilities that could’ve been—Yoli flying with her sister to Switzerland, Molotschna’s women loading up and hitting the road, Knute and her daughter living happily in the little town of Algren, Manitoba. Even as a Toews ending fractures the heart, seeds of what a better life could look like are inside. And it makes reading her feel like grace.
