Having fled the strictures of her Mennonite upbringing, the Canadian author searches for meaning in her older sister’s death: ‘She taught me how to stay alive’
Long before she became one of Canada’s most celebrated authors, Miriam Toews was an 18-year-old with a restless streak, set on fleeing the strictures of her conservative Mennonite community. Toews’s family descended from Russian Mennonites and spoke Plautdietsch, an unwritten language. They grew up in a world with little privacy, many unofficial rules and the threat of excommunication. Toews and a boyfriend had planned a bike trip across Europe, one in which they would sit on the grave of John Keats and smoke too many cigarettes.
Before she left, her older sister Marj asked a favor: would Toews write letters to her while she was away? Marj, then 24, had recently moved back home and was in a period of deep depression. She had stopped talking, but she would still write. “She was so sick,” says Toews, sitting across from me at a picnic table in Toronto’s Trinity Bellwoods park.
Toews began writing to her sister, partly because she loved talking to her and partly because she hoped it would save her life. “Which, of course, is a ridiculous idea,” says Toews. “That me writing letters would keep her alive. But I really took it seriously.”
