And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. “I remembered the four of us, our family, when we were all young and sane and alive, when we didn’t have stitches in our heads and trembling hands,” Toews writes, and it’s wrenching because that’s the way we go through life: watching youth fade and health slip away and mortality claim the people who’ve walked alongside us.Warning: This Article Addresses the Topic of Suicide and Self-Harm There is hope in it, and a deep sense of home and family, and an encoded determination to live.

“All My Puny Sorrows” is awash in fear and grief and pain, but it is for all that not a bummer of a book. The detail feels a little too imposed, yet that’s exactly what Yoli stands to lose if she loses Elf. It was a cryptic reference to the phrase “all my puny sorrows,” from a Samuel Coleridge poem that mentions a beloved only sister, keeper of her sibling’s secrets.

When they were kids, and Elf was devouring poetry, she went through a period of spray-painting the letters “A.M.P.S.” on surfaces around town. They hope that this dark interlude will pass as others have before, that she will return to her joyous self, that her music will once again sustain her.īut she has always been the one in the family most like her father, and he died by throwing himself in front of a train.

Like Nic and her sweet, resilient mother, Yoli is hypervigilant, exhausted, half-crazed by her efforts to keep Elf alive. Yoli, a writer, flies back and forth between Toronto, where she lives, and Winnipeg, where Elf’s crises keep erupting. “Remember that time I thought it would be a real kick-ass idea to go to school with some of mom’s pantyhose pulled over my face,” Yoli writes to Elf, “and you quietly whispered into my ear on your way out of the house: Swivelhead, attempt to be cool.” She was kind, too, bestowing on Yoli, six years younger, the teasing nickname “Swivelhead.’’ In East Village, the Mennonite town where they grew up, Elf was a role-model rebel, fearlessly defiant of the elders and their opposition to female autonomy. Healthy, Elf is funny and spirited amid the suffusing sadness, so is the book. That’s so morbid.’ĭrawn on the author’s experience with her sister, Marjorie, who killed herself four years ago, the Canadian writer Miriam Toews’s seventh book, “All My Puny Sorrows,” is at times as jagged and ripped open as a freshly torn heart.īut Yoli, our narrator, sees her sister whole, not merely as someone who wants to die.

All my puny little sorrows