‘My sister, my God. It’s a visceral pain that never goes away’: Miriam Toews on a memoir of suicide and silence

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. Continue reading...

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So long, London boys – Taylor Swift is engaged to the all-American Travis Kelce, and it makes so much sense

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Culture

So long, London boys – Taylor Swift is engaged to the all-American Travis Kelce, and it makes so much sense

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