What the blurb tells us:
Elf and Yoli are two smart, loving sisters.
Elf is a world-renowned pianist, glanorous, wealthy, happily married: she wants to die.
Yoli is divorced, broke, sleeping with the wrong men: she desperately wants to keep her older sister alive.
When Elf’s latest suicide attempt leaves her hospitalised weeks before her highly anticipated world tour, Yoli is forced to confront the impossible question of whether it is better to let a loved one go.
TW: mental illness, suicide
Warning: Spoiler alert. Read with caution 🙂
I finished Toews’ book yesterday and Elf and Yoli are still with me. I laughed a lot; I cried several times. This is a story about mental illness, surviving, and letting someone go. This is a story about suicide and survival, about intentionally leaving this world, even though there would be no need to do it just now (i.e. no fatal disease or other physical failings that would make life unbearable). This is a story about death and family and losing the people we love. In short: for some people, being free means being able to leave whenever and however they want to…
Can’t you just be like the rest of us, normal and sad and fucked up and alive and remorseful?
Dark topics, important issues
Writing about death is always difficult, because it is a tense and emotional topic; even more so when writing about suicide. Most people do not understand why someone wants to die. Many of us experience difficult times, lose people we love, and can have a hard time coping with all the shit life throws at us. Still, we move on — or, as Winston Churchill once said “If you’re going through hell, keep going.” But it is not like that for everyone. Some just want to stop going, because they cannot do it any longer…and they have every right to do so, no matter how hard it is to understand for everyone else.
There are certain books that are meant to be with me — All my puny sorrows is one of those. Every time I read stories of mental illness, I feel dread and fear rising up. I can all to well remember how I felt years ago when I myself had to figure out how to “keep going.” Sometimes I’m afraid all this could come back if I read too much about it, think too much about it — I can be overly empathic and emotional, not being able to distance myself from the things around me, and I’m still very much afraid of depression, that kind of depression I experienced back then. Still, I never actively thought about taking my own life, because I always believed that it would get better. To me, suicide was a sort of last resort in case I would truly lose all hope — and I can understand when someone passes this stage and ends his or her life.
Beautifully told
I love Toews’ language and special sense of humor. It is so important to not only keep going but also keep laughing, especially with heavy topics like these — death, suicide, and losing people you love. And they lost a lot. What was once a huge family is now a humble bunch of loved ones, threatened to shrink even further. When the inevitable happens, I was still shocked and surprised. Even though it’s ‘just a book,’ I still hoped. For all those around her and for Elf herself.
Because if you are not feeling, thinking, and living in this very special void that mental illness creates, you see hope, even in the darkest days. If you know this void — the multitude of voids —, have been there, seen it, felt it, you may understand that someone does not see any more sense in ‘keep going.’
I love Elfrieda, who is a survivor as long as she can take it. I love Yoli and Lottie, her sister and her mother, who ‘keep going’ after losing so much, keep laughing because in the midst of a storm, you have to save yourself and those close to you, the ones that can, that want to be saved.
I want to thank Miriam Toews for lightning up my soul and mind. I prefer to block out anything that may remind me of darker days, but Elf and Yoli brought some things up that were not even half as frightening as I thought it would (or could) be. Thanks for making me laugh out loud. Thanks for writing a book about some of the roughest storms of life that feels like a warm and bright summer breeze…
Highly recommended 🙂