All My Puny Sorrows

Content Warning: This section of the guide discusses death by suicide. 

Miriam Toews is a Canadian author. She has published nine books of both fiction and nonfiction. These titles include the following: Summer of My Amazing Luck (1996), A Boy of Good Breeding (1998), Swing Low: A Life (2000), A Complicated Kindness (2004), The Flying Troutmans (2008), Irma Voth (2011), All My Puny Sorrows (2014), Women Talking (2018), and Fight Night (2021). Swing Low: A Life is a work of nonfiction and All My Puny Sorrows is heavily autobiographical. The novel was also adapted into a film in 2021 and stars Alison Pill and Sarah Gadon. In 2022, Women Talking was also adapted for the screen, and stars Frances McDormand, Rooney Mara, and Claire Foy.

Toews grew up in the Mennonite community in Steinbach, a small farming town in Canada’s Manitoba province. “Mennonites are similar to Amish, traditionally living in isolated, rural communities with restricted interaction with the outside world. The community in Canada is formed of families whose forebears fled persecution after the Russian revolution” (O’Keeffe, Alice. “Miriam Toews: ‘I Worried People Would Think, What Is Wrong With This Family?’” The Guardian, 2 May 2015).