All my puny sorrows

by Miriam Toews

Paperback, 2015

Status

Available

Publication

London : Faber and Faber, 2015.

Description

Elfrieda, a world-renowned pianist, glamorous, wealthy, happily married: she wants to die. Yolandi, divorced, broke, sleeping with the wrong men as she tries to find true love: she desperately wants to keep her older sister alive. But Elf's latest suicide attempt is a shock: she is three weeks away from the opening of her highly anticipated international tour. Can she be nursed back to "health" in time? Does it matter? As the situation becomes ever more complicated, Yoli faces the most terrifying decision of her life.

User reviews

LibraryThing member jveezer

"Suicide is an event that is a part of human nature. However much may have been said and done about it in the past, every person must confront it for himself anew, and every age must come to its own terms with it.”
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832)

This book was amazing. Miriam Toews has

taken this thorny, divisive issue and written a beautifully heartbreaking book that brings out the emotions, decisions, and struggles that engulf the people who deal with suicide. Toews is no stranger to suicide, having had a sister commit suicide after many attempts. She pulls no punches in her stark portrayal of suicide. And I thank her for making me think hard about it.

This is a book that really struck me as a lover of literature and as a writer. Toews, and her characters, the autobiographical Yolandi and her cerebral and artistic older sister Elfrieda, are obviously well read. There are lots of literary quotes and references throughout the novel, from the above referenced quote of Goethe, to the lifting of the title of the book from Coleridge’s poem “To a Friend, With an Unfinished Poem,” to the quoting of D.H. Lawrence’s “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” that I’ve included at the end of this review because it is so apropos to the story. I love it when books send me off searching for a referenced quote or work or author.

While it might be easy to get annoyed with the suicidal Elf, it is almost impossible to not love her sister Yoli. She is such a “hot mess” compared to the successful sister but she does everything in her power to help her sister either live (preferably) or die (possibly) while also trying to be there for their mother, her own children, and the extended family and friends. An impossible task handled sometimes with humor, sometimes with resignation, and sometimes with despair. Toews does a masterful job of portraying the strong bond of sisterhood.

This is my year of reading writers that present as women (see what I did there?), in order to honor them, and in acknowledgement of the fact that the publishing industry is so skewed towards male-presenting writers. Once again, Powell’s Books Indiespensable Subscription Club has put an amazing author’s book in my hand.

“Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically. The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up new little habitats, to have new little hopes. It is rather hard work: there is now no smooth road into the future: but we go round, or scramble over the obstacles. We've got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen." –D. H. Lawrence

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LibraryThing member Jaylia3

I always fall hard for the novels Miriam Toews writes and the characters she creates. A best selling author in Canada, most of her books involve individualistically inclined or exiled Mennonites balancing their traditional upbringing with the modern world in distinctive stories of personal struggle

and family connection. The details about Mennonite culture and its fringes give the stories added interest and a strong sense of place, but it’s the characters that really set her novels apart.

In All My Puny Sorrows one sister has it all. Elfrieda Von Riese has always been eccentric, passionate, talented and intense--a dances to her own drummer Mennonite--and now as an adult she’s a wealthy, beloved, beautiful, world acclaimed pianist in a wonderfully loving marriage, but in spite of all that goodness Elf is determined to kill herself, somehow never having developed a tolerance for living in the world. Her sister Yolandi, in contrast, is a twice divorced now single mother, drifting in and out of relationships and perennially broke, who desperately wants to keep Elf alive. “She wanted to die and I wanted her to live and we were enemies who loved each other.”

It’s not a plotline that would normally attract me, and the story is more character than plot anyway, but Toews gives her characters such captivating, heart-piercing voices that I sank deep and only reluctantly put down this thoughtfully nuanced, non-condescending, family celebrating book. The title comes from a poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

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LibraryThing member jmoncton

I am ashamed to admit that in the past, I haven't felt that much sympathy for people who attempt suicide. I had always thought that it was a selfish and narcissistic act, causing irreparable pain to everyone around them. But, I don't know anyone who has and suicide hasn't been an event (thankfully)

that has impacted my life. Author Miram Toews, on the other hand, is all too familiar with suicide. Her father committed suicide and then 12 years later, her sister also killed herself -- both of them died by throwing themselves in front of a train. All My Puny Sorrows is the semi-autobiographical story of 2 sisters -- Elfrieda, a world class pianist and Yoli, a not very well known children's author. Elfrieda is successful, beautiful, married to a wonderful husband, but she wants to die. Yoli, on the other hand, is struggling on many fronts. She has had 2 failed marriages, ekes out a living writing children's books about girls who compete in horse barrel racing, and continues to fall for the wrong kind of guy. But where her life is really falling apart is that her sister has attempted suicide multiple times.

Although the subject of this novel sounds abysmally depressing, Toews throws in humor to this story. And it's not sick, dark humor, but an interesting way of looking at how ridiculous our lives sometimes turn out. I found myself laughing aloud and then crying at other parts. I can't express how much this book touched me. It definitely made me look at my life differently and the lives of people around me. Highly recommended.

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LibraryThing member whitreidtan

Sisters have a strange bond. They fight like cats and dogs but they love each other right down to the marrow of their beings. They can frustrate each other, annoy each other, even dislike each other at times, but they are still connected in inexplicable ways. Often they find their roles in the

family and they hew to those roles forever after. In Miriam Toews' latest novel, All My Puny Sorrows, there are two sisters caught in their self-defined roles as one of them actively seeks to leave this world and the other struggles to keep her sister in it.

Elfrieda (Elf) is a world-renowned concert pianist. She is happily married to a wonderful, thoughtful, and loving man. She's successful beyond all imagining. And yet she is deeply depressed, attempting suicide regularly. Yolandi (Yoli) appears to be the diametric opposite of her older sister. Given half a chance, she consistently bollockses up her life and needs to be bailed out by her sister. Despite her chronic money problems, the difficulties of single parenting, and multiple failed relationships behind her, she is generally pretty happy. Or she would be if her beloved sister wasn't so determined to kill herself. Not only does Elf want to die but she wants Yoli to help her, concocting schemes for them to go overseas together where Elf can get enough of certain drugs to finally succeed in dying. What does Yoli owe Elf though? Does she owe it to her sister to help her or does she owe it to her to try and keep her safe? Yoli wants to be the loyal, unquestioning, and adoring sister she's always been but this leaves her torn about the right thing to do.

Elf is not the first in her family to contemplate suicide. In fact, Elf and Yoli's father committed suicide himself. His quiet beliefs in writing and reading put him at constant odds with their Mennonite community, as does his unwavering support for Elf in her forbidden love of piano, poetry, and her unconventional personality. This longstanding history of the two sisters, as well as past persecutions in Russia, weaves in throughout the more present narrative where Elf is in a psychiatric hospital instead of preparing for her upcoming concert tour. The story is entirely from Yoli's first person perspective as the unsuccessful sister and Elf is only envisioned through her eyes. This persepctive makes it that much more shocking for the reader when Elf admits to Yoli that she has spent a lifetime being the responsible one in order to give Yoli the space and freedom to screw-up. And because we see Elf's despair through the lens of Yoli, there seems to be no definable reason for her crippling depression. Yoli doesn't understand quite the ways in which performing both saves and drains Elf, nor the way the pressure to fulfill her familial role overwhelms her. Instead she is left to wonder whether her sister has the right to die if she is seemingly healthy and only suffering mentally. Is this a mental illness deep within her bones that plagues Elf and if so can she be judged sane in her desire to die?

The narration feels akin to but not exactly stream of consciousness and is very much one sided. There is little action involved; the story relies almost entirely on character development to keep the reader turning pages. Elf as a character is sneaky and determined, non-compliant with her doctors' orders, only wanting to be loosed from the hospital in order to accomplish her ultimate goal. Yoli's character is conflicted and at least somewhat sympathetic as she weighs her own needs and wants as versus her sister's. The story is roughly based on Toews' own family situation and there is a poignancy about it and a truthfulness to both the grief of living in fear for a depressed loved one and the scary inability to truly save someone who has no interest in being saved. As a novel centered on suicide and the desire to die, there is a lot of bleakness and depression, of course, but there's also humor strewn throughout the story that leavens the certain despair, sadness, and sorrow at moments when it threatens to overwhelm the reader. The writing is serious, intimate, and meticulously chosen; it's very well-written. The story as a whole though is somewhat ponderous and the pacing is slow and deliberate. As a look at the toll depression takes on not only the sufferer but those who love her, this is masterful but as an engaging story, it just doesn't quite reach the same level.

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LibraryThing member Writermala

This Canadian novel by Miriam Toews is a wonderful, poignant tale with pathos and drama. What distinguishes it from other books of its class is the humor built into it. Toews manages to bring humor in at most unexpected times and it saw me in stitches when I was near tears!
Yoli sees that Elf wants

to die while she wanted her to live this made them enemies who loved each other. Yoli is in a quandary when her sister Elf with the near perfect life begs her to assist in suicide. The resulting agony keeps the thread of the story moving at a fast pace. I could not put it down once I'd started it.

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LibraryThing member judylou

Yolandi and Elfrieda are sisters. They grew up in a Mennonite Community where her family did not really fit in. Yoli has grown up to be an author of a series of rodeo books for young girls, she is divorced, broke and she has two children. Elf has become a world renowned concert pianist with a

husband who loves her, no children and an unassailable need to die.

The family is familiar with death, as the girls’ father suicided when they were younger. Elf has tried her best, using knives, pills and even bleach, but each time has been brought back from the brink to be placed in the psych ward for months at a time.

Toews herself is from the same background as Yoli and Elf, growing up in a Mennonite community. She also had a father and a sister who committed suicide. Yet this does not come across as a memoir. It attests to Toews’ ability as a writer, that she can approach this subject with her usual sense of wry humour. There are some laugh-aloud moments in this book, just as there are some very sad moments. But they sit side by side without melancholy and without being overly sentimental.

This is a very perceptive story. It portrays the shame and the guilt of suicide and the resentment and heartache involved in loving someone with a mental illness. It also portrays the strength of the bond between siblings; not only that of Yoli and Elf, but also of their mother and her sister who does what she can to support the family. This cannot have been an easy book to write, but it is certainly an easy book to read.

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LibraryThing member gbill

A strong novel about a tough subject to write about, the desire to end one’s life. There is a certain heaviness to the book as the narrator grapples with her sister’s depression, and yet, I found it to be more about life and relationships than it was about darkness, so don’t let the subject

put you off too much. Toews mixes in the right levels of humor and touching moments, but most of all, she tells the story with honesty and authenticity, and doesn’t resort to melodrama. I loved how her novel was intelligent and yet down to earth. The family has plenty of flaws, made poor decisions, and survived being a part of a conservative Mennonite community, but they are well-read and highly cultured. The book’s title comes from a Coleridge poem, ‘To a Friend’, and there are many other poetic references: Dorothy Parker (“What fresh hell is this?”), Madame de Staël (“beyond all doubt, if you are not as happy as it is possible to be, you are more beloved than anyone who has ever lived”), and Philip Larkin (“What are days for?”), among many others.

There are several frank passages on ways of committing suicide, from the drastic (in America, jumping in front of a train), to buying medications normally used to put pets to sleep (in Mexico, Nembutal preceded by an anti-emetic such as Dramamine), to being legally put to sleep (in Switzerland, where euthanasia is legal for non-citizens who’ve simply grown weary of living). And, it’s telling that it’s the sister who is beautiful, talented, smart, and has love around her in life that paradoxically wants to end it, because she’s seen its absurdity and is wrought with inner angst.

The women characters in the novel are strong, such as the feisty old mom and aunt, and the bond between the sisters is special and heartwarming. The narrator recalls one time after having her heart broken, her sister sending her a quote from Paul Valery, one word per letter, so that it takes months to decode “Breath, dreams, silence, invisible calm…you will triumph.” One does wonder, are there actually people who do this? … but it’s so incredibly sweet and literary you have to smile. The book really hits its stride in Chapter 5, mixing humor, relationships, and memories in a hospital visit between the two. Also fantastic is Chapter 8, which has some wonderful letters which are intelligent, poignant, and offbeat, essentially microcosms of the book as a whole. I don’t want to spoil anything, but will just say that Toews is skillful in navigating these waters, and I love how she played this one out.

Quotes:
On beauty:
“Her smile is an event.”

On depression:
“Did Elf have a terminal illness? Was she cursed genetically from day one to want to die? Was every seemingly happy moment from her past, every smile, every song, every heartfelt hug and laugh and exuberant fist-pump and triumph, just a temporary detour from her innate longing for release and oblivion?”

On love:
“Dan wanted me to stay. I wanted Elf to stay. Everyone in the whole world was fighting with somebody to stay. When Richard Bach wrote ‘If you love someone, set them free’ he can’t have been directing his advice at human beings.”

On time and meaninglessness:
“I tell her all right, I’ll leave but I’ll be back tomorrow. She says isn’t it funny how every second, every minute, every day, month, year, is accounted for, capable of being named – when time, or life, is so unwieldy, so intangible and slippery? This makes her feel compassion toward the people who invented the concept of ‘telling time.’ How hopeful, she says. How beautifully futile. How perfectly human.”

Lastly, these bits of humor:
“He had come to Winnipeg to write a libretto. But who hasn’t? It’s a dark and fecund corner of the world, this confluence of muddy waters, one that begs the question of hey, how do we set words to life’s tragic score?”

“She started telling stories about me when I was a kid … that I was the toughest girl in town, and that nobody made her laugh harder and that all her piano performances, really, were inspired by my life, by the wild, free, rhythm of my life, combined with its delicacy, its defiance (which I knew was shorthand for being messed up but unable to admit it), or something like that. That she tried to play her piano the way I lived my life: freely, joyfully, honestly (shorthand for: like a cheerful halfwit with no social skills).”

“I remember the sex talk she gave me when I was twelve or thirteen. She asked me if I knew what a hard-on was and I said yes and she said great! That was it, the extent of it, my terse navigational guide to the biggest minefield confronting humankind.”

“He put his arm around her and said blessings on you, girl, and she told him she was sorry that he had to visit her here. He said no. We don’t apologize for being sick, for being human, for being weary (Uncle Frank has obviously never been a woman.)”

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LibraryThing member mdoris

I really liked this book! It was like having a long and wonderful visit with a very good friend and you could both say whatever you wanted! I wanted to read it with a pencil to put a star beside passages that were perfect. Passages that gave so much meaning and were expressed so well, pearls! It is

a sad book as it is about grief and acceptance and relationships, and caring. It's about family. It is full of strong vulnerable emotions. There is so much humour and cleverness in the book and the characters jump out fully formed. The undercurrent of the book is the Mennonite community and its pull, with it's long tough history and role expectations. There was such love and warmth in this book.

some quotes
" They were apoplectically supsicious of higher learning-especially for girls. Public enemy number one for these men was a girl with a book." p 12

" The sons inherit the wealth and pass it on to their sons and to their sons and the daughters get sweet fuck all....But whatever we descendants of the Girl Line may not have wealth and proper windows in our drafty homes, but at least we have rage and will build empires with that, gentlemen." p. 230

"The brain is built to forget things as we continue to live, that memories are meant to fade and disintegrate, ......that the pain of letting go of grief is just as painful or even more painful than the grief itself. p. 314.

Words won't feed the Admiral's cat!" p. 317

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LibraryThing member Citizenjoyce

I had to abandon this one. The narcissistic manipulation by the suicidal character was too infuriating. I kept thinking, "If she's that determined, just let her go and get on with your lives," which is probably why I was a labor and delivery nurse rather than a mental health professional.

LibraryThing member lit_chick

"When I listened to her play I felt I should not be there in the same room with her. There were hundreds of people but nobody left. It was a private pain. By private I mean to say unknowable. Only the music knew and it held secrets so that her playing was a puzzle, a whisper, and people afterwards

stood in the bar and drank and said nothing because they were complicit. There were no words.” (Ch 4)

Elf and Yoli Von Reisen are smart, loving sisters, and polar opposites. Elf is a world-renowned pianist, glamourous, wealthy, adored, happily married: she wants only to die. Yoli is a mess, divorced, broke, looking for love in the wrong places – and desperately trying to keep her sister alive. The novel opens in the white-hot pitch of a medical emergency room right after Elf has attempted suicide, not for the first time. Yoli, by turns wickedly funny and heartbreakingly real is, of course, by her sister’s side. If it’s what Elf wants, she’ll do what she can to nurse her back to health in time for her world tour, several weeks out. But Elf’s request will shock her: the assistance she requests of Yoli has nothing to do with her upcoming tour. And so the younger sister is faced with a terrifying decision.

Toews is a talented writer, no question. I was taken with both storyline and subject matter immediately, and settled in for what I expected to be a 4.5 or 5* read. But here’s my trouble: the entire novel, but for the final 50 or so pages, is written at such a fevered pitch that it became too much. When at last Elf has succeeded, and Yoli and their mother have settled down to the business of getting on with life, I could breathe again and enjoy – but by then, the story was over. Sadly, this is not one I will recommend, but others have thoroughly enjoyed it.

“I tried to apologize, to ease the tension. I didn’t know what to say. I quoted Goethe … “suicide is an event of human nature which, whatever may be said and done with respect to it, demands the sympathy of every man, and in every epoch must be discussed anew” … (Ch 18)
_____________

Hilarious Quote:
(I'm still chuckling about this, even after I’ve closed the novel)
The setting of here is the same small Manitoba Mennonite community of which Toews wrote in A Complicated Kindenss. The church elders, attempting to control every aspect of its citizens’ lives, occasionally provide comic relief, as when a troubling rumour gets out that Elf might want to attend university, leading to a “raid” on the family home by the bishop:

“He showed up on a Saturday in a convoy with his usual posse of elders, each in his own black, hard-topped car (they never carpool because it's not as effective in creating terror when thirteen or fourteen similarly dressed men tumble out of one car) and my father and I watched from the window as they parked in front of our house and got out of their cars and walked slowly towards us, one behind the other, like a tired conga line.” (Ch 1)

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LibraryThing member RandyMetcalfe

It is impossible to read this novel without an awareness of certain events in author Miriam Toews’ life badgering you with every line, with every page you turn. Some years ago Toews’ father committed suicide. Some years after that her sister followed suit. It is a harrowing reality that

bombards every moment of this fictional account of the repeated, and eventually successful, suicide attempts of a brilliant pianist and her sister’s efforts to thwart this and/or contemplate the possibility of acceding to her sister’s plea and helping her. Sometimes writers are urged to write about what they know. Sometimes they should think twice.

Of course the writing here is brilliant. It effervesces. Toews’ talent tends toward the rapid fire one liner, which here fires off without pause, plunging breathlessly onward, faster and faster, through one unmitigated disaster to the next, hurtling headlong into…what? Exactly. We begin in the feverish white heat of the emergency ward and for the next 250 pages we remain at that extreme state of anxiety. It begins to feel and read as though the non-suicidal sister is losing her mind. And rightly so. And thus, it is only in the denouement, which lasts a further 60 pages, that All My Puny Sorrows begins to read like a novel.

I’m certain that Toews found great relief in writing this novel (she says as much in interviews about it). As such it serves its purpose as a kind of grief therapy. For the author. But what does the reader gain from this? Not, I think, what Toews has gained, for few if any of us will have suffered the kinds of immediate loss that she has had to face. Instead, we are offered the chance to witness her grief therapy. Sort of. But that isn’t itself therapeutic for us. And it doesn’t make for a satisfying novel either. Might it perhaps, then, at least have some value as a spur to debate over the possible legalization of assisted suicide? I fear that is precisely how the book has been embraced in the literary community, and it is a mistake. Toews’ private grief made public is not a good grounding for a discussion on the rationality of suicide.

For my part, I think Toews is a wonderful writer. She has an immense talent. It is sad that her life is filled with almost Greek-like tragedy. Suitable material for weeping and the gnashing of teeth. Which would be a perfectly reasonable response. However, the principal characters in Greek tragedies don’t overcome their tragedies by creating art. Rather, Sophocles comes along decades later and enlightens and informs us of their tragic plight. Sadly, not recommended.

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LibraryThing member LynnB

Elfrieda is suicidal. She is a beautiful, successful, talented pianist with a loving husband who wants to die. Her younger sister, Yolandi, is the narrator in this story. She has two children from two failed marriages, is trying to write a novel, and trying to keep her sister alive.

Miriam Toews is

an amazing writer. There are sentences in this book that took my breath away for the depth and honesty of emotions they portray. This is a sad story of love and depression -- but it's also a story of family life, complete with often humourous incidents about a Mennonite family that isn't "good" enough for the church elders; about a mother who is aging well, but not always gracefully; about teenagers pushing the boundaries.

The characters are so real; basically good people, often quirky, sometimes doing the right thing, but sometimes not. An excellent book.

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LibraryThing member kcshankd

A hard subject, well told, the tone just struck me as a bit... off.

LibraryThing member latorreliliana

Wonderful poignant book about a sister trying to lift her sister out of depression.

LibraryThing member pgchuis

A very beautiful and sad book, but mysteriously also very funny. Toews shows the absurdity of trying to persuade a patient to come to the communal table to eat by otherwise withholding food when all they want to do is die anyway and her portrayal of Elf's mother is affectionate and hilarious. There

was something very uplifting about the way the family suffered tragedy after tragedy with dignity and a sort of acceptance and kept on going in love. My favourite scene was where Yolandi says all the things to Elf that she won't let others say: What about me? I'm the screw-up whose life is a disaster - I should be the one despairing and getting comfort from you.

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LibraryThing member Romonko

This book provides an unflinching look at the lives of two sisters who grew up in a small Mennonite town in Manitoba. Elfreida (Elf) is the oldest and the most mercurial. She follows her dream and becomes a world-famous concert pianist who plays concerts around the world. Yolandi (Yoli) is six

years younger than her beautiful sister, and her life leads her to more traditional roles. She marries twice and has two children (one from each husband). We meet these two sisters when Yoli is in her mid-forties. She is in the process of getting a second divorce, and she's raising her two children on her own in Toronto. Elf still lives in Winnipeg with her husband, but she has done something that has brought her sister and her mother to her side. Elf suffers from severe depression, and she has just tried to take her own life. The close family and extended family are all brought together to rally by Elf's side. We meet Elf and Yoli's mother Lottie, their favourite aunt Tina and Elf's husband Nic as they all try to understand what has happened to their beautiful Elf. Ms. Toews depicts the incredible heartbreak and sadness that severe depression brings to all members of a family, not to just the one that suffers from the condition. Yet this book is not sad and morbid either because the humour and strength displayed by all of the characters in the book provides a sense of hope and acceptance throughout. Elf and Yoli's mother is wonderfully depicted. She has always disagreed with the Mennonite way of life, and even went on to pursue a career in social work after she had had her family. Her and her husband allowed their lively girls to pursue what they wanted to, even if it took them outside of their small community, and even if it resulted in the public disapproval of the elders in their community. Lottie's pragmatic look at life and her strength and sense of humour reminded me so much of my own late mother-in-law. She too was a tiny, strong woman who met life head on, and who refused to take anything sitting down. There were many times when she gave me the strength to fight another day.

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LibraryThing member triscuit

At a time when suicide is on our collective minds, this rings so absolutely true. Not everyone has a world-famous sister afflicted with depression but we are all becoming aware of how close it is to each of us. Horrific but so finely told that is a compelling, somehow soothing, read.

LibraryThing member cygnoir

A devastating rumination on choosing to live, choosing to die, and who exactly owns these choices. Not an easy read but a necessary one.

LibraryThing member mjlivi

Bloody hell, this is such an achingly sad book. The novel is narrated by Yoli, a writer, whose sister Elf is in hospital following an attempt to kill herself. It's a bleak, funny, moving and heart-wrenching story of love, despair and futility - the whole plot is basically a tug of war between Elf

and her family, whose love doesn't seem to be enough to keep her alive. It sounds unremittingly bleak, and it's definitely downbeat, but the voice of Yoli snaps you out of the sadness with wit and sarcasm and you find yourself laughing in the midst of a dreadfully sad story. Toews is a fantastic writer, and this is her most moving book.

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LibraryThing member oldblack

This book is brilliant, in my opinion. It has deeply, deeply affected me. Actually, the only people I can think of who wouldn't love this work would be some Mennonites or those who can't cope with reading words such as f*** and c****. Miriam Toews must be a truly remarkable woman to have survived a

situation such as the one she describes in this book.

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LibraryThing member hubblegal

Touching story of two sisters and their family and the effect of severe depression on each of them. There are some very humorous moments which help lighten the depressing subject matter. I cared about these characters and what would happen to each of them. The book made me appreciate the choices we

make each day to embrace life or to reject it. Recommend!

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LibraryThing member icolford

Miriam Toews’ extraordinary novel All My Puny Sorrows is an examination of the tragedy inherent in the condition of being human and alive, possibly one of the most brutally honest we’re likely to encounter. This is a novel primarily of two sisters. Yolandi, the narrator, is an author with

several moderately successful young-adult novels to her credit and Elfrieda is a concert pianist with a global reputation and a devoted fan base. Yolandi is more or less contented with where she is in life, if she forgets for a moment that she has given birth to two children by two different men, neither of whom is married to her, that she’s broke, and that she’s bored with the YA novel series and carries the manuscript of her unfinished literary novel around with her in a plastic bag. Elfrieda, intensely intellectual, childless and married to doting and long-suffering Nic, has built a riotously successful concert career. She can write her own ticket whenever she wants by going on tour because everywhere she goes her concerts sell out. The difference is that Elfrieda is desperately unhappy and wants to die. Indeed, desperation is at the crux of the novel: the action revolves around Yolandi’s desperate efforts to keep her sister alive and Elfrieda’s equally desperate efforts to slough off a life that has become a torment. Elfrieda’s latest suicide attempt has taken place in the weeks leading up to another concert tour. Yolandi, her mother and Nic struggle to bring Elfrieda through this latest crisis, hopefully in a way that won’t jeopardize the tour. But as the story progresses it becomes clear that the tour will not happen. Central to the novel is a loving, supportive and emotionally intimate relationship between two siblings. At a certain point Yolandi realizes that she will never convince her sister that life is preferable to death, and with this realization finds herself facing a crisis of conscience. The brilliance of Miriam Toews is her ability to take a situation fraught with grief and despair and unbearable sadness and leaven it with humour. This is a family that has suffered a similar loss in the past (the girls’ father killed himself) and as Yolandi struggles to decide on a course of action and we approach what seems an inevitable outcome, Yolandi's behaviour grows erratic and the prose develops a frantic demented momentum that makes it a joy to read. Most of us have been touched in some manner by suicide. It’s impossible to not feel strongly about it. The decision to end a life, even (especially?) your own, should never be easy or simple. All My Puny Sorrows teaches that only by accepting the tragedy of life for what it is will we triumph and move forward.

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LibraryThing member Smits

The dialogue in this novel is outstanding.To make suicide at all humorous must be very difficult but Miriam Toews does it. Her characters, Elf and Yoli, sisters, are so well developed and so interesting. I love their crazy mother and Yoli's friend Julie. The only reason I did not give a higher star

is I didn't like how it ended. !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Not at all. I don't get it.

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LibraryThing member Lindsay_W

After listening to Miriam Toews CBC Q interview with Jian Ghomeshi, I realized how much of her own experience Toews put into All My Puny Sorrows. Having lost a sister and father to suicide, she is aware of the agonizing struggle between not giving up on someone, and knowing when the best you can do

for them is to let them go. She also writes as one who understands the journey to reclaim one’s own life after a suicide, and the role that humour can play.

This book will certainly resonate with anyone who has felt the burden of being one who has to be “ok” for someone grappling with the ‘hidden malady’ of mental illness, or someone who has had to live with what they did, or did not do, for a suicidal person.

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LibraryThing member Eesil

This is a beautifully written book. And so sad. I didn't realize that it was based on Toews own relationship with her sister until I was well into it, which made it even sadder and at times really hard to read. I am close to giving it 5 stars, but because it's so sad and at times -- not fairly I

know -- I found myself getting angry with the sister, I can't bring myself to give it 5 stars. Not rational nor a fair way to rate a book I know. Definitely makes me feel like reading Toews other books.

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