Description
Book SynopsisPerceptive, controversial, topical, and achingly funny, Miriam Toews’s books have earned her a place at the forefront of Canadian literature. In this first monograph on Toews’s work, Sabrina Reed examines the interplay of trauma and resilience in the author’s fiction. Reed skillfully demonstrates how Toews situates resilience across key themes, 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 the reframing of the Mennonite diaspora as an escape from patriarchal oppression. The dual suicides of Toews’s father and sister stand out as the most shocking and tragic of the author’s biographical details, and Reed explores Toews’s use of autofiction as a reparative gesture in the face of this trauma.Written in an accessible style that will appeal to both scholars and devotees of Toews’s work,
Lives Lived, Lives Imagined is a timely examination of Toews’s oeuvre and a celebration of fiction’s ability to simultaneously embody compassion and anger, joy and sadness, and to brave the personal and communal oppressions of politics, religion, family, society, and mental illness.
Table of Contents
- Ch 1: Home is Where the Hope Is? A Complicated Kindness and A Boy of Good Breeding
- Ch 2: “On the Road” (With Children): The Flying Troutmans and Summer of My Amazing Luck
- Ch 3: “All trauma presents a choice”: Irma Voth and Women Talking
- Ch 4: “Coming for to carry me home”: Autofiction and Reparation: Swing Low: A Life and All My Puny Sorrows
- Epilogue: The Fight Against the Night: Fight Night
