Miriam Toews
Miriam Toews
Miriam Toewsis a Canadian writer, best known for her novels A Complicated Kindness and All My Puny Sorrows. She has won a number of literary prizes including the Governor General's Award for Fiction and the Writers' Trust Engel/Findley Award for body of work. She is also a two-time finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and a two-time winner of the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize...
NationalityCanadian
ProfessionWriter
CountryCanada
inside life roar
'Cue for Treason,' by Geoffrey Trease, radicalized my young girl brain and made me want to be a gender-bending, sonnet-writing anarchist. It really made something roar to life inside of me.
certain decide feels forget good likes love might praise written
A person might see that I've blurbed a certain book and decide they want nothing to do with it! Like, 'If that reprobate Toews likes it, forget it!' So, it's a crapshoot. But it feels good to be able to praise a book that I love or that has been written by a new writer.
road-trip window rhythm
I love road trips. You get into this Zen rhythm; throw sense of time out the window.
boys lakes air
Even a Menno sheltered from the world knows not to stick her tongue into the mouth of a boy who owns an Air Supply record. You might stick your tongue into the mouth of a boy who owned some Emerson, Lake and Palmer, but you would not date him on a regular basis, or openly.
uncles dad disappointment
A few weeks ago my uncle came over to borrow my dad's socket set and when he asked my dad how he was my dad said oh unexceptional. Living quietly with my disappointments. And how are you
expectations joy becoming
She was becoming sad. There is no joy involved in following others' expectations of yourself
erotic masters prose
David Bergen is a master of taut, spare prose that's both erotic and hypnotic. . . .
powerful wall blood
It bothered me in a kind of Charles Manson way to have a brown smear of blood on my wall but I also liked it because every time I looked at it I was reminded that I was, at that very moment, not bleeding from my face. And those are powerful words of hope, really.
weed grief mushrooms
But love, like a mushroom high compared with the buzz from cheap weed, outlasts grief.
way lost ifs
If, along the way, something is gained, then something will also be lost.
body disease would-be
I wondered if it was possible to donate my body to science before I was actually dead. I wondered if a disease were to be named after me what the symptoms would be.
background genuine good love religious strive
You don't need a religious background to strive for something good, for genuine compassion and love for others.
depressed incumbent people ridiculous sister smile
With my father and sister being very depressed for most of their lives, it was incumbent on me to try to make them laugh, in this ridiculous way. They were the wittiest people I knew, but to get a smile from them was like winning the lottery.
built family people resistant virus
There are people who are just suicidal, regardless. They are built to self-destruct. It seems, in my family, like a virus that's resistant to any kind of help or care or medication.