All My Puny Sorrows by Miriam Toews

This book broke me apart, numerous times. Every time I read some of it, there was a turn of phrase that just flayed the skin off my bones. Once, I sat stuffing my fist into my mouth and silently screaming, because the feelings it provoked were so intense. This is probably not a book you want to read if you've recently lost someone or are dealing with the prospect of losing someone. Unless you need that process to be seen, to find your experience reflected. This book does that. I do not think I could have read it a year ago, but I'm very glad I read it now.

Look, if you'd asked me a month ago what my top book of the year was going to be, there would have been only one candidate: N.K. Jemisin's The Stone Sky. Now there are two candidates and I do not know which one I will pick.

Miriam Toews is always an amazing author, one who frequently brings me to tears, and so it is with that in mind that I say that this is the best book of hers I've read. It is so raw, so visceral, so mundane in its capturing of the strange twilight world of hospitals and of dread and of grief. There were things I recognized on a molecular level. There were aspects of it that were not part of my experience, but which she captured so clearly and so unsparingly that I ached.

I have grief in common with the narrator (and there are certain similarities to Toews' own experiences, but I am not going to psychoanalyze what is fictional and and what is not. I'm not sure it's a useful distinction here, and at any rate, it's a fool's game.)  I have had days that rotate around the hospital, around a hospital bed.

I do not have in common the experience of being with someone I love dearly when they are suicidal. I do not know what it is like to watch them try, again and again and beg you to help them by taking them to Switzerland where they could kill themselves legally and peacefully. I do not know what it is like to be so pulled between a desire for the person to stay and a desperate knowledge that they will never want to. (I mean, I know the desire for the person to stay, but every time it's been a process where nobody's wishes had anything to do with the outcome.)

Yoli, the main character, a novelist, is with her sister, Elfrieda, intermittently, through suicide attempts. So is their mother and her sister's partner. They all struggle with wanting her to live without being able to do anything to get her to want to live. And this is not a book where it's about volition or selfishness. It's not simple at all. It's desperately complex, and the knotting up of the main character over whether or not to help her sister is brutal. To be asked to do something that would remove someone you love most from the world, to be asked in the process to damage all the relationships you would be left with afterwards, if you helped a loved one die by suicide without their knowledge. I cannot see a good answer, and it is awful.

Elf's struggle to find a way to die is juxtaposed with other sudden health crises, as the world does not patiently wait for one catastrophe to resolve before another happens. And there is a similarity and yet a difference between Elf's experience in hospital and that of Yoli and Elf's aunt. The body betrays us. The mind betrays us. The world is inexorable, and what you want has so little to do with it. Except for Elf, who wants above all to die.

It is the medical professionals who treat Elfrieda like she's being selfish, who reproach her for not getting better, not her family. Yoli and Elf have already lived through the suicide of their father, they know the terrain. Yoli's mother weathers all these losses, and one of her daughters trying desperately to leave the world, and it hurts.

It is how clear and how direct Toews' prose is that makes this devastating. It isn't flowery, it isn't trying to make this more tragic by piling on poignant details. It relies on little observations, the ways in which real life continues, in which the world is what the world is, the way the times when you are not at the hospital coexist with the times that you are. And every one of those observations is a knife that cuts.

Near the end, Yoli talks about her mother moving to live with her in Toronto, and there's a line about three women circling the wagons and coping with their dead, and I lost it. I'd lost it before, but this line cut right through everything in the world, all the grief I'd been able to carry more lightly, and made me want my sisters, made me want the women of my family and our partners, and to have us all together. We've been together, online, but I wanted so strongly to have them here, right now.

And then, of course, there's watching the Blue Jays as a grieving technique, and I know that so intimately as well. So much of this resonated, despite the different circumstances. I have rarely read a book this powerful. I don't know that my heart could take reading a novel like this often, so that might be a good thing. It is so good, and so painful.