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.
Chapters 5-8Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 5 Summary
Yoli visits Elf again the next morning, bringing her food and presents. While Elf sleeps, Yoli checks her email, finding messages from Dan. Their communications often alternate between aggression and affection. In the bathroom, she studies her haggard reflection and wishes that she’d stop trembling. Back in the room, Elf wakes up. Yoli tries making her laugh but Elf closes her eyes again. Yoli starts sharing memories with her, desperate for her to wake back up. In one memory, Elf defended Yoli while they were at a lunch together, telling the table that she played the piano “the way [Yoli] lived [her] life” (72). Finally, Elf opens her eyes and asks Yoli about her book. Yoli is working on a literary novel and has been carrying the manuscript around in a plastic bag. Elf begs her to read an excerpt, but Yoli will only tell her the first letter.
Yoli contemplates Elf’s situation and considers the differences between mental and physical health. She remembers Jack planting her and Elf trees when they were born and Elf insisting that they’d be protected forever.
Yoli takes a walk through the halls. When she returns to Elf’s bedside, she tries getting Elf to talk about her lovers. Elf then asks about Yoli’s boyfriend, Finbar, and Yoli reveals that she’s sleeping with another man, too. The narrative shifts into the past as Yoli remembers the first time she heard about sex and the sexual jokes Elf made growing up. She admired Elf and tried being like her.
In the present, the sisters continue their conversation about sex and relationships. Yoli privately remembers all the time that Elf spent with Will and Nora when they were little. She then turns the conversation back to Elf. Elf gets annoyed that Yoli keeps trying to make her feel better and asks Yoli to tell her about Toronto instead. She shares a few anecdotes, which Elf insists have lessons in them, too. Claudio calls Yoli, interrupting the conversation. She takes the call into the hall. Claudio is worried about Elf, as the tour is coming up and he hasn’t heard from her. Yoli dodges his questions.
Back in the room, Yoli tries asking Elf about the tour. Elf doesn’t like that Yoli seems to be pushing her to perform. Then the nurse comes in and Elf makes a joke. The nurse is heartened, but Elf and Yoli don’t look at each other. The nurse leaves and Yoli tells Elf more about her life, revealing that she’s having her tattoo removed because she and Dan have the same one.
Chapter 6 Summary
Yoli reads Richard Holmes’s Footsteps, desperate for answers. Jack and Elf were always the readers in the family. Then Elf asks Yoli to take her to Switzerland, as assisted dying is legal there. Yoli protests, but Elf keeps begging her. Yoli wonders if Elf’s condition is a terminal illness and remembers her father’s death by suicide. She wants Elf to find reasons to live. Starting to cry, she moves to leave. On her way out, Elf assures her that she doesn’t have to be ashamed of having two lovers.
Yoli talks to Janice before leaving. She doesn’t have the answers that Yoli wants. Then Yoli leaves, accidentally ending up in a tunnel in the hospital basement. Trapped, she sits down and takes out her manuscript. Then she gets back up and finds a door out.
In Lottie’s car, Yoli grips the wheel and says Elf’s name. She often feels better being in the car. Afterward, she and Nic meet up for drinks. They start arguing about Elf and her rights. Yoli starts to feel bad for getting upset and realizes how grateful she is for Nic. They talk more about Elf and her mantras, one of which was simply Yolandi’s name.
Out on the street, Yoli and Nic pass two teenagers carrying a canoe. Nic stops them, warning them not to take the boat out as the weather is bad. He then gives them money for bus tickets to their destination and insists on housing their canoe until they’re back. In the car afterward, Yoli insists that Nic saved the boys’ lives. She checks her phone and finds messages from Nora.
Yoli gets pulled over for texting and driving. The cop lets her off with a warning when he realizes that she’s Lottie’s daughter; he plays Scrabble with Lottie in town. Afterward, Yoli drives to Julie’s. They sit outside talking about their past and its effect on their lives.
Chapter 7 Summary
Yoli collects Lottie from the airport. Later, Yoli wakes in the middle of the night and calls the hospital to check on Elf. Meanwhile she listens to the ice in the river. Discovering that Lottie is up, too, she suggests that they play cards.
Yoli and Lottie visit Elf at the hospital. Elf insists that she “woke up feeling like a different person” and is ready “to do the tour” (105). Yoli and Lottie are unnerved and worry that she’s not ready to leave. Yoli tries asking Janice about Elf’s condition, but Janice can’t stop Elf from leaving, because she admitted herself. Back in the room, Lottie assures Yoli that everything will be okay.
Elf is discharged and the family celebrates over dinner that night. Yoli feels frustrated and wants to shout at Elf. She feels that she has more reason to die by suicide than Elf. Later, she takes Nic aside to discuss Elf’s situation. He’s worried about her, too, but hopes that the tour will energize her.
Yoli and Lottie say goodbye to Nic and Elf. Before leaving, Yoli promises to write Elf letters while she’s on tour. Yoli has to return to Toronto, because Will has to get back to New York and Nora would be alone. Later on, Yoli wakes in the middle of the night to find Lottie talking to a neighbor from the balcony. She then solicits Yoli and the neighbor’s help to move her organ to Julie’s house. When they return, Yoli runs on the treadmill in the apartment gym.
Chapter 8 Summary
Yoli writes to Elf. She updates on her life, her writing, and her relationships.
Elf doesn’t reply to Yoli’s letter and won’t pick up Yoli’s calls. She calls Lottie to see if Elf is okay, but Lottie doesn’t know.
Yoli writes Elf another letter. She tells her what she and Nora have been up to, describing her relationships and Nora’s dance practice.
Lottie informs Yoli that her sister, Tina, is coming to Winnipeg to help her. Elf isn’t doing well. Yoli tries writing her another letter, including details of Nora’s boyfriend, Anders, and her relationship with Finbar. Shortly thereafter, Nic informs Yoli that Elf did well at her pre-tour rehearsal. The next day, Lottie calls Yoli while she’s out on a walk to say that Elf attempted to die by suicide again. She slit her wrists and drank bleach. Yoli flies back to Winnipeg.
Chapters 5-8 Analysis
Elf’s vacillating mental health augments the narrative tension and stakes. Elf’s protracted hospitalization also impacts Yoli’s state of mind and in turn induces formal shifts. In particular, the longer that Elf is in the hospital, the more often Yoli’s narrative shifts into the past. These temporal shifts are at times induced by Yoli’s private thoughts, when she retreats into remembrance because this temporal realm feels safer and happier than her present circumstances. Her memories offer her more pleasant iterations of her family’s life together. At other times, they are inspired by Yoli and Elf’s conversations, during which Yoli recalls memories to her sister in an attempt to awaken her to life once more. Such moments reveal Yoli’s desperation to convey the transformative and Enduring Strength of Sibling Bonds to her sister. In one hospital scene, Yoli’s voice becomes increasingly restless when she fears that Elf is falling back asleep:
She closed her eyes again and I said no! No, no, no, please keep them open. I asked her if she remembered Stockholm. The embassy, Elf? Remember? She’d invited me to hang out with her in Sweden for a week when I was pregnant with Will and we’d had a tragicomic experience at the Canadian embassy, where she’d been invited for lunch the day of her opening at the Stockholm Concert Hall (71).
The stylistic patterns in this passage capture Yoli’s desperation to retain her and Elf’s closeness. Her use of exclamation points, question marks, and repetition affects a harried, desperate tone. Furthermore, the memory itself presents a time when the sisters were sharing life together and when Elf was engaged in her musical work. Yoli is therefore relying upon her and Elf’s history together to change Elf’s regard for life. Ultimately, she is trying to convince her sister that their bond is worth living for.
Throughout these chapters, Toews uses atmospheric detail to provide further insight into Yoli’s internal world and to reify the Impact of Mental Health on Family Dynamics. For example, when Yoli gets lost in the tunnel, the tunnel represents entrapment and confusion. Yoli finds herself in this corridor by accident, where she “walk[s] for a while and push[es] on several doors” until she finally sits down “on the concrete floor” (92). This scene parallels Yoli’s experience in the narrative present: She feels confused and ensnared by her sister’s situation and doesn’t know how to find a way out. The image of her sitting down captures her feelings of defeat, while the image of her standing up and finding a door implies that she is determined and resilient. The scene in which she is in the car alone then shows how Yoli feels isolated and immobilized by grief. She’s in a car but isn’t driving and simply holding onto the wheel, capturing her feelings of powerlessness. The same is true of the scene in which she is on the treadmill. Yoli is running, but she isn’t making any real progress forward. She feels the same way in her relationship with Elf, as she hasn’t been able to convince her of the value in life. The other images of the ice, river, park, and mud capture the inevitability of seasonal shifts. Yoli has a feeling of inevitability attached to her sister’s depression and suicidal ideations, too. Yoli desperately wants Elf to want to live but also understands the force of her despair. Toews hence uses imagery and description to vivify Yoli’s inarticulable emotional experience.
These chapters also introduce the novel’s explorations of the Importance of Art and Creativity to Survival. For Elf, playing the piano is a large facet of her identity. Even before she devoted her life to performing, Elf displayed an inherent talent for music. In the narrative present, therefore, characters including Yoli, Nic, and Lottie hope that Elf’s artistic practice will encourage her to survive. Nic, for example, knows “that touring terrifies [Elf] before she goes” but that it also “makes her feel exhilarated when she’s actually doing it” (111). Elf’s family therefore believes that music offers her life meaning and purpose. They hope that reconnecting with the piano will inspire her to reconnect with herself and engage with life anew. They encourage the tour despite their concerns because they believe that art has redemptive power.
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