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 the spectacular Women Talking, about cloistered women who gather in secret after a series of sexual assaults, Toews grapples with the humiliations of motherhood, the burdens of sisterhood, abuse, grief and suicide: a wound from her own life that she nurses throughout her work. Her novels are heart-wrenching and raw; they’re all, in some way, about the drudging ordinariness of female pain, everyday indignities from which she extracts big tearful belly laughs. “To be alive,” Toews writes, “means full body contact with the absurd.”
Toews’s primary theme is the battles of women in a world of cruel men, and intergenerational misfires as mothers try to protect and warn their daughters. Her eighth novel, Fight Night, is an ode to grandmotherly defiance, embodied by a kind of ancestor that I, too, know well: a mouthy immigrant, an old-world fighter, a fiery human contradiction.
