by McSweeney’s in November and by Knopf Canada in April, and winner of Canada’s Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize and a finalist for the Giller and Governor General’s Prizes-chronicles Elf’s numerous hospitalizations and teases out what it means to be utterly inconsolable. All My Puny Sorrows-published in the U.S. Indeed, they were a mighty duo until Elf (as she is known to family and friends) developed a serious mental illness in her 40s that left her not only clinically depressed, but suicidal. Together, the pair has spent decades exploring, gossiping, and testing the waters of adulthood and identity. Her sister Yolandi, six years her junior, and the protagonist of Miriam Toews’s new novel, has always been her confidante and accomplice. To her I poured forth all my puny sorrows.Īnd that’s exactly what Elfrieda has done. When Elfrieda Von Riesen was a teenaged misfit growing up in the tiny Mennonite community of East Village, Manitoba, she came upon a poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge that seemed as though it had been written expressly for her:
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