“She also criticizes the Canadian health-care system and its tendency to bully people into compliance and how that can be very difficult, especially if someone is mentally ill and so is not, by nature, compliant.” The Canadian writerly bond Reed emphasizes Toews' treatment of issues such as fundamentalism and bullying of all sorts. I think it’s that combination of ability to be funny while also talking about very serious topics that makes her so interesting to people.” “She is an excellent writer in terms of portraying a character’s voice as well and then you add to that how often you’re laughing out loud as you read her books, even when she’s talking about something extremely sad. “She has this amazing knack of combining the comic with the tragic. This balancing act is one of the reasons she has proven popular as well as critically acclaimed. These are weighty topics, but Toews infuses her novels with an abundance of humour. Reed further explores Toews’ use of autofiction as a “reparative gesture” in the face of the Toews’ family trauma. Lives Lived, Lives Imagined focuses on how resilience emerges in Toews’ work as a key theme, including the home as both a source of trauma and an inspiration for resilient action the road trip as a search for resolution and redemption and Toews’ retelling of the story of the Mennonite diaspora, not as an escape from religious persecution, but as a critique of patriarchal oppression within the community itself. She has won the Governor General's Award for Fiction (A Complicated Kindness) and the Writers' Trust Engel/Findley Award for her body of work. Towes’ novels include A Complicated Kindness, All My Puny Sorrows, Irma Voth, Fight Night and Women Talking. And then as she published more and I started looking at her work in more detail, I thought, ‘What an amazing writer and nobody’s written a full-length book on her.’ In fact, there wasn’t that much written on her in general, so I thought, ‘There’s somebody who needs a full-length treatment.’”

Her works often feature people who deal with mental illness, and in her own life Toews lost a father and a sister to suicide. “I started reading her work about 20 years ago when I became interested in how mental illness is depicted in literature, and Canadian literature especially,” Reed explains. In a new book, Lives Lived, Lives Imagined: Landscapes of Resilience in the Works of Miriam Toews (University of Manitoba Press, 2022), Mount Royal University English professor Sabrina Reed, PhD, examines Toews' novels through the lens of trauma and resilience. That said, surprisingly little has been written about the Manitoba author’s work. Poignant, sad, but at times laugh-out-loud funny: novels by Miriam Toews are incisive classics of Canadian literature. Mount Royal University English professor Sabrina Reed, PhD. Institute for Innovation and Entrepreneurship.Institute for Environmental Sustainability.

Miriam toews new book