All My Puny Sorrows

“The men in the living room remained silent, as though they were being reprimanded. Elf played louder, then quieter, then louder again. The birds stopped singing and the flies in the kitchen stopped slamming up against the windows. The air was still. She was at the center of the spinning world. This was the moment Elf took control of her life.”

Yoli’s description of Elf’s piano playing develops the novel’s exploration of the Importance of Art and Creativity to Survival. Yoli is identifying this moment as a turning point in Elf’s storyline and therefore attaching significance to Elf’s musical expression. Miriam Toews uses descriptive language and sensory detail to conjure a passionate, emotional mood.

“I was trying to act tough but I truly believed that I might die from heartbreak when my sister went away, to the extent that I had written a secret will, bequeathing my skateboard to Julie and my lifeless body to Elf, which I hoped would make her feel really guilty for leaving me to die alone.”

Yoli’s fear of saying goodbye to Elf when she leaves for Europe foreshadows Elf’s death at the novel’s end. This retrospective passage also clarifies the Enduring Strength of Sibling Bonds and the significance of Yoli and Elf’s history together. While the words like “die,” “heartbreak,” and “lifeless” are histrionic to reflect their teenage sensibilities, they express her profound discomfort with being away from her sister and foreground Yoli’s fears of Elf’s death.

“She says how sorry she is and I tell her nobody is angry, we want her to be okay, to live. She asks me how Will and Nora are, my kids, and I tell her fine, fine, and she covers her face with her hands. I tell her that she and I could mock life together, it’s a joke anyway, agreed, okay? Agreed! But we don’t have to die. We’ll be soldiers together. We’ll be like conjoined twins.”

Toews’s linguistic stylings in this passage affect a harried, anxious narrative tone. Yoli imbeds her and Elf’s dialogue into her narration, thus blurring the tonal qualities of their conversation with her overarching description of it. The lack of quotation marks makes it unclear who is speaking, reflecting the way that their bond makes them “conjoined.”

“I stood on my mom’s balcony and listened to the ice breaking up. It sounded like gunfire, a mob scene playing out over a track of roaring animals. The moon was full and hanging low like a pregnant cat. I could see lights in the houses across the river. I saw people dancing. I could make them invisible with the tip of my finger and one eye closed.”

Toews’s attention to environmental detail and use of simile provide a gateway into Yoli’s interior world. Yoli is trying to focus on the images and sounds around her to pull her out of her mental unrest. At the same time, she’s manipulating what she sees and hears by shifting her lens and by comparing her surroundings to associated images and sounds (for example, “like a pregnant cat”). In these ways, she’s trying to control her experience.

“When she went away to Oslo to study music she sent me tapes of herself talking about her life in the city, and then she was studying with some guy in Amsterdam and after that a woman in Helsinki. I listened to the tapes over and over in the dark and pretended she was there with me. I had them memorized, every inflection, every breath, and I talked along with her, over her, even her little chuckles. I had memorized it all.”

Yoli’s relationship with Elf’s recordings conveys her deep attachment to her sister. She regards the tapes as representations of her sister and relies on them to feel close to Elf when they’re not together. The passage thus proves the Enduring Strength of Sibling Bonds while also suggesting that Yoli is learning to live without Elf’s presence even before she dies.

“What do you mean? I don’t know what you’re asking me. I don’t remember what I am. I am what I dream, I am what I hope for. I am what I don’t remember. I am what other people want me to be. I am what my kids want me to be. I am what mom wants me to be. I am what you want me to be. What do you want me to be? Don’t we need to stick around to find out what we are? What do you want me to be?”

Toews’s use of repetition, questions, and anaphora in this passage of dialogue captures Yoli’s frustration with her sister. Yoli understands herself according to her relationship with her sister and therefore feels frustrated that she and Elf don’t seem to be communicating effectively. The anaphora of “I am” conveys her attempts to confirm her sense of identity while Elf’s life is at risk.

“Did Elf have a terminal illness? Was she cursed genetically from day one to want to die? Was every seemingly happy moment from her past, every smile, every song, every heartfelt hug and laugh and exuberant fist-pump and triumph, just a temporary detour from her innate longing for release and oblivion?”

Yoli asks this series of questions about Elf because she wants to understand her sister’s experience. The way she is thinking about Elf’s life in the past and present captures the Impact of Mental Health on Family Dynamics. Elf’s experience of depression doesn’t simply affect Yoli’s life in the present but is also changing how she thinks about her and Elf’s childhood together.

“Listen! I want to shout at her. If anyone’s gonna kill themselves it should be me. I’m a terrible mother for leaving my kids’ father and other father. I’m a terrible wife for sleeping with another man. Men. I’m floundering in a dying non-career. Look at this beautiful home that you have and this loving man loving you in it! Every major city in the world happily throws thousands of dollars at you to play the piano and every man who ever meets you falls hard in love with you and becomes obsessed with you for life. Maybe it’s because you’ve perfected life that you are now ready to leave it behind.”

The diction in this scene of dialogue affects an angry, desperate tone. Yoli is confronting Elf in a way she doesn’t often do. She’s imploring Yoli to understand her experience, which is why her first-person pronouns feature prominently throughout the passage. Yoli is also creating a direct comparison between her and Elf’s life because she wants Elf to see how happy her life really is; however, the undertone of the passage conveys that external factors cannot grant someone intrinsic happiness.

“My mother phoned me today while I was walking through a muddy park next to the lake. When my cellophane rang I looked at it for a second before answering. She’s done it again, said my mother. I squatted in the mud. And said, tell me.”

Yoli’s environmental circumstances are a metaphor for her emotional experience. The image of the mud and Yoli squatting in it conjures notions of messiness and immobility, which mirror Yoli’s internal response to the news about Elf. The abrupt full stop after “mud,” cutting this word off from the connective “[a]nd,” reinforces the sense of stuckness.

“When I was fourteen Elf came home for Christmas. She had just been at Juilliard on some kind of special scholarship. Amazing things were happening. She had a top agent and gigs lined up all over the world. Elf and I were sitting on the floor of the bathroom and she was crying inconsolably and I was trying to get her to stop crying and come to dinner. The table was set and all of our relatives from my father’s side were seated already. We had candles, turkey, singing, the celebration of the birth of a messiah that I still believed in. Elf told me she couldn’t do it, she just couldn’t do it.”

Yoli’s descriptions of her family’s Christmas celebration conjure a hopeful, happy mood. However, this mood contrasts with her and Elf’s experience inside the bathroom. The disconnect between these competing atmospheres captures the pervasiveness of Elf’s experience of depression and its effect on Yoli.

“Does it make you happy to think of Nic or mom finding your dead body? I’m whispering now too. I’ve become her torturer and I’m so ashamed. I’m so angry and so afraid. I don’t want the nurses to hear me. Elf twists my hand hard and it hurts. Her hands are strong still, from playing. I twist back and she makes a small noise that manages to escape the tube that’s rammed down her throat.”

Yoli employs an accusatory tone in this scene of dialogue because she’s afraid of losing her sister. Yoli is attempting to overpower Elf with words while she’s physically immobilized. The image of the tube in Elf’s throat conveys powerlessness, while the image of Elf twisting Yoli’s hand conjures notions of resistance and determination. The sisters are therefore at odds, because they have different regards for life and competing desires.

“It sounded naive to me now and selfish and fearful to say you must live, you must want to live, you have to live. That’s your one imperative, the single rule of the universe.”

Yoli asks herself about mental health because Elf’s experience of depression is changing her outlook on life. The tone of this passage is curious and inquisitive, which captures Yoli’s desire to understand Elf and validate her experience. Yoli’s ability to change her mind supports the novel’s argument that people shouldn’t dismiss physician-assisted death.

“My aunt nodded and told me that the woman would tell me that but probably not for a while, maybe years, and then only silently, in her thoughts, so I wouldn’t hear it but one day I’d be walking down some street and feel a kind of lightness come over me, like I could walk for miles, and that would be the moment when the woman from the parking lot had suddenly understood my horrible outburst, that it had nothing to do with her or her husband or her child, and that it was okay.”

Yoli’s conversation with her aunt Tina reveals Yoli’s desperation for approval, forgiveness, and validation from others. The passage also conveys Tina’s empathetic nature. Tina plays a pseudo guide role in Yoli’s life when she’s in town and is thus offering her insight into her emotional unrest. The passage is one long, run-on sentence, which contrasts with Yoli’s clipped and agitated passages, thus reinforcing Tina’s soothing presence.

“You don’t want me to talk about the past because it’s too painful because there were good times, there was life, and it might persuade you to change your mind and you don’t want me to talk about the future because you don’t see one and so what—okay, I’ll talk about this second. I just inhaled. The sun moved behind a cloud. I exhaled. You’re in bed. A second is passing. Another one. Oh…and another one! I’m inhaling again.”

Yoli’s combative tone in this scene of dialogue captures her frustration with Elf and feelings of powerlessness. She wants to help Elf but also feels as if Elf’s demands and needs are immobilizing her, arresting her to the present and therefore making her restless. Furthermore, she employs a sarcastic tone because she feels that her attempts at kindness and empathy haven’t resonated with Elf.

“The problem, I read online, was not getting the drug but bringing it back over the border. So then, I thought, I had to get Elf to Mexico rather than the drug to Elf. Also, just opening the bottle for Elf would make me guilty of manslaughter. Some of the anonymous writers said that even a suggestion to the person wanting to die—all right, well how about we get that bottle now—could make you an accessory to manslaughter.”

Yoli’s internal monologue about assisted dying reveals her desire to help Elf. This passage marks a turning point in the narrative, because Yoli is considering Elf’s request in a more serious manner for the first time. At the same time, the cyclical nature of these lines, as Yoli shuttles between doubt and determination, enacts Yoli’s logistical concerns and ongoing internal conflict over the matter.

“And then all I could think of was my younger self, the person I was before I’d become all of these other selves: a soon-to-be-divorced woman in her forties who’d clumsily left her husband even if for reasons I’d thought were valid at the time, a grotesquely undiscerning lover, an adult daughter who nagged her elderly mother about the use of clichés, a sister who couldn’t say the right things to save a life and thereby was flipping over to becoming homicidal, a writer who bogusly claimed to know about ocean freighters and a ‘death tourist.’”

The length and complexity of this sentence evokes a restless, frenetic tone. Yoli’s sense of her own identity is in flux, and thus the portion of the sentence in which she attempts to define herself is long and winding. In turn, the passage is enacting Yoli’s emotional state and underscoring how Elf’s situation is affecting her state of mind.

“Finally my mother was able to catch her breath and speak. She couldn’t bear to see Elf in the psych ward. That prison, she said. They do nothing. If she doesn’t take the pills they won’t talk to her. They wait and they badger and they badger and they wait and they badger. She began to cry again, this time quietly. She’s a human being, she said again. Oh, Elfrieda, my Elfrieda.”

Toews’s use of repetition and negation in this scene of dialogue conveys Lottie’s frustration and powerlessness. The repeated use of the words “wait” and “badger” are particularly significant in this regard, as they suggest that nothing about the situation is changing. At the same time, the passage speaks to the novel’s explorations of the healthcare system and psychiatric care in Canada, suggesting that the system is insufficient.

“An idea came to me. I would invite Elf to Toronto to stay with me for a while when she was released from the hospital. I’d be there to take her home with me for a visit. We could walk and talk and rest and there would be no pressure and I would be at home, working, sort of, so she wouldn’t be alone.”

Yoli’s use of the future conditional tense affects a hopeful tone. Yoli is actively trying to construct a plan to help her sister. She’s imagining into the future while simultaneously trying to convince herself of her ability to grant Elf her wish. However, the conditional tense also highlights the lack of certainty regarding this imagined future.

“Nora and I walked back to our apartment. She carried both rackets and the balls and I held her other hand, the free one. I thought it was strange that I could hear the subway rumbling there beneath the ground and then realized it was only my thoughts smashing against one another and attempting to rearrange themselves into something new.”

Toews uses descriptive detail, imagery, and figurative language to convey Yoli’s emotional response to Elf’s death. The image of her and Nora holding hands captures Yoli’s need for support. The description of the “subway rumbling” and her “thoughts smashing” together connote violence and upheaval. The train references also echo the way that Elf died.

“Will slept on the couch in the living room and Nora, my mother, and I slept together that night in my mother’s giant bed. She swept all the things that were on it, whodunits, clothing, glasses, agenda, her laptop, onto the carpet, but we didn’t get much sleep. We talked late into the night and early into the next morning, about Elf, her inimitable style, about the past, about anything. Except the future, that was mortal combat territory.”

The image of Yoli, Nora, and Lottie sharing the same bed captures their reliance on each other to survive their sorrow; they each represent three generations attempting to overcome generational trauma. At the same time, Yoli’s allusions to the past and the future reveal how fearful the family is of imagining a world without Elf.

“AFFECT ME? I said. I’m sorry. People were looking at me. Listen, I said, I don’t think you understand. I don’t want to be presumptuous, but really how could you understand what another person’s suicide means? My friend asked the waitress for more coffee. I said that actually, now, I’d begun to measure a person’s character and integrity by their ability to kill themselves.”

Yoli’s frantic tone conveys her frustration with her friend. Her emotionality, conveyed by the stigmatizing word “kill” instead of “suicide,” is also a manifestation of her grief over Elf’s recent death. The passage therefore develops the novel’s explorations of the Impact of Mental Health on Family Dynamics.

“That sounds pretty good, I said. My mother was dreaming of survival. She was having survival dreams. She was having dreams that were telling her how to keep being alive. I wouldn’t tell her that frozen foods are full of sulfates, who cares, when she was deep into the cure.”

Yoli’s meditations on Lottie’s experience provide insight into the characters’ mother-daughter relationship. Yoli is reflecting on Lottie’s dreams and learning from them in turn. She uses words like “dreaming,” “survival,” and “alive,” which affect a hopeful tone that is inspired by Lottie.

“She told me that the brain is built to forget things as we continue to live, that memories are meant to fade and disintegrate, that skin, so protective in the beginning because it has to be to project our organs, sags eventually—because the organs aren’t so hot anymore either—and sharp edges become blunt, that the pain of letting go of grief is just as painful or even more painful than the grief itself.”

Lottie’s reflections on life, memory, loss, and grief grant Yoli perspective on her own sorrow. The structure of the long sentence, punctuated by em dashes and commas, mirrors the relentlessness of grief itself. At the same time, the passage includes allusions to evolution and preservation, which evoke notions of survival.