https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/08/25/something-has-come-to-light-fiction-miriam-toews
Perhaps you have read novels by Miriam Toews or saw the excellent movie based on one of them, WOMEN TALKING. A memoir by Toews comes out this month. Toews, who fled her Mennonite community at 18, has said she feels the need to write about who she might have been if she stayed.
This story is set in the Mennonite community in Manitoba. A farm wife near death at an old age tells the story of a boy she met, and refused, as a girl. It is quite short but paints a good picture of a religious community and this particular woman.
We get so few stories about Mennonites or the Amish. Their world is rarely talked about although there is quite a large community in Sarasota, FL and I see they do have their own publishers and books.
7 comments:
Nope, never read her, don't know her.
I'm reading several collections now, but mainly the Jane Smiley book you did last week, THE AGE OF GRIEF.
Wow! This interests me a lot, Patti. I'd not heard of Toews or her work, but it sounds as though she has an interesting background, and I don't know enough about the Mennonite community.
They have large communities in Pennsylvania, Margot.
Never heard of the author. Here's mine for this week: Great English Short Stories Part V
https://ahotcupofpleasureagain.wordpress.com/2025/08/20/ssw-great-english-stories-ed-lewis-melville-and-reginald-hargreaves-1930-part-v/
Somewhat extra-literarily, an Amish community played a reasonably even-handed role in one of the first-season episodes of the Sherlockian CBS TV series WATSON, which is mostly set in and around Pittsburgh. An apostate woman member is given on-site moral support by her still-segregated cousins when they learn of her medical plight.
I have a similar vintage bug-crusher I keep slowly indexing while fighting off summer A/C colds, before settling down to write about.
I have Miriam Toews on one of my lists of Canadian authors to check, but I did not know much about her. Then I did see she had a short story in the New Yorker.
Now you have told me more about her and I have looked into her books and I am definitely interested. I will be check them out.
Post a Comment