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
buying conscious fast happens life
The writing life is one long, never-ending search for narrative. Well, it's not even a conscious searching. It happens even while you're busy buying groceries and when you're fast asleep. It's a curse.
against brain coherent coming experience feeling sore stops struggling thread writer
A writer is always, always searching, even against her will, against all her better instincts, for the thread of a story. Everything is fodder. Everything is fuel. You can feel it coming on like the tingling of a sore throat. The brain never stops struggling to reshape every experience and feeling into a coherent narrative.
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.
amount depressed enormous inner pushed
A depressed person is often a person who will push others away. If you are pushed away and pushed away and pushed away, you have to have an enormous amount of inner resources to keep going back.
life material raw
In writing fiction, I can be free. I can use my life. The raw material is my experiences.
spent town
I spent 18 years in a small Mennonite town in the middle of the Canadian prairies.
comic division humour
I don't see any division between the comic and the tragic. I feel like I'm writing about serious things, and humour is one of my tools. It's not contrived, just part of my world, part of the way things are to me.
beside died dollars friend iron julie money says thai time trees
My father died beside trees on iron rails... He had 77 dollars on him at the time, and we used the money for Thai takeout because, as my friend Julie says about times like this, 'You still have to eat.'
aspect comforting everybody knew russia safe
I remember a very nurturing, safe environment: everybody knew who I was, who my parents were, who my grandparents were, what part of Russia we were from originally. That was a really comforting feeling. Non-Mennonites, when they see that aspect of it, think it's a beautiful thing, and it is, but there's so much going on besides.
beautiful lying helping
Is it wrong to trust in a beautiful lie if it helps you get through life?
sadness home thinking
I had a thought, on the way home from the rock field, that the things we don't know about a person are the things that make them human, and it made me feel sad to think that, but sad in that reassuring way that some sadness has, a sadness that says welcome home in twelve different languages.
rain persons
It's raining questions around here. A person could drown in them.
road-trip window rhythm
I love road trips. You get into this Zen rhythm; throw sense of time out the window.
depression dark mirrors
There are no windows within the dark house of depression through which to see others, only mirrors.