51 pages • 1 hour read
Miriam ToewsAll My Puny Sorrows
Miriam ToewsFiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2014A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Authorial Context: Miriam Toews
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). Because of her cultural and religious background, Toews’s books are often set in parallel Mennonite communities. In All My Puny Sorrows, the primary characters, Yoli Von Riesen and Elf Von Riesen, were steeped in this tradition as children and remain in conflict with the Mennonite church as adults. Similar narrative circumstances feature in Toews’s other novel’s, particularly A Complicated Kindness and Women Talking.
Toews also has experience working as a freelance journalist and in film. She received a bachelor’s in the film from the University of Manitoba and a bachelor’s in the journalism from the University of King’s College, Halifax. She currently lives in Toronto, the same Ontario city where Yoli lives in All My Puny Sorrows.
Medical Context: Assisted Dying
All My Puny Sorrows interrogates right to die laws internationally. This is in large part because Yoli’s sister, Elf, lives with depression and asks Yoli to help her arrange a physician-assisted death in Switzerland. Yoli is internally conflicted over whether to grant Elf her wish. Her research into assisted dying raises sociopolitical questions about the issue on the page.
In Toews’s interview with Alice O’Keeffe for The Guardian, Toews explains that her interest in assisted dying in the novel directly correlates with her own experience. In 2010, Toews’s own sister died by suicide when Toews hesitated to help her work with Dignitas. Dignitas is a nonprofit organization in Switzerland that grants assisted death to patients with terminal illness or severe mental health concerns. When Toews’s sister was alive, and at the time All My Puny Sorrows is set, physician-assisted dying was illegal in Canada. The supreme court has since “overturned the law that made it illegal to assist dying—and not only in cases of physical illness” (O’Keeffe). By incorporating these issues into All My Puny Sorrows, Toews is “argu[ing] in favor of assisted dying” (O’Keeffe).
While this novel presents an argument for physician-assisted dying, the Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID) program in Canada has been the subject of significant controversy. On March 17, 2027, Canada plans to extend the program to include people with mental illnesses alone, not just physical “illness, disease, or disability,” like Elf (“Medical assistance in dying: Overview.” Health Canada). However, people have argued that death will become “a stopgap for a broken social safety net” and that psychiatric care for vulnerable people should be a priority (Honderich, Holly. “Who Can Die? Canada Wrestles with Euthanasia for Mentally Ill.” BBC World News, 14 Jan. 2023). Others have suggested that this program will make vulnerable populations—such as people with disabilities, unhoused people, and people of color—even more vulnerable, as they may opt for “state-assisted death due to their circumstances” instead of the state instituting protective social policies such as adequate housing (“Poor, Lonely and Homeless Opting for Assisted Death in Canada.” CARE, 18 Oct. 2024). All My Puny Sorrows does not explore such social factors.
Allusions to assisted dying pervade All My Puny Sorrows and create narrative tension. These references also expand Toews’s underlying questions about mental health and the Canadian healthcare system, whose injustices she exposes in her descriptions of Elf’s time on various psych wards.
While the novel is set in Canada and explores assisted dying in Mexico and Switzerland, it also sheds light on parallel debates in the United States. In the US, physician-assisted death is legal only in California, Colorado, Hawaii, Maine, Montana, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oregon, Vermont, Washington, and Washington, D.C.
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