In Her Voice: Women Talking by Miriam Toews

Miriam Toews Women Talking photo credit In Her Voice.  All other photos belong to Girl Well Read - do not use without permission.

Ben McNally Books, In Her Voice, and Knopf Canada celebrated the release of Miriam Toews' newest work, Women Talking.  The event took place in Toronto at the Isabel Bader Theatre where Toews took the stage for a reading.  She was then joined by Rachel Giese and the women discussed the inspiration behind the book, Miriam's writing process, and how she gave a voice to these events.

Over several years in the mid-2000s, the women of the Manitoba Colony of Mennonites in Bolivia reported waking up with injuries consistent with being sexually assaulted, only they had no memory of the incidents.  The male elders said that it was either a demon at work, or that it was their "wild female imaginations".

Then, one night in June 2009, two men were caught trying to enter a home and subsequently the truth came out.  A group of nine Manitoba men, ranging in age from 19 to 43, confessed to raping the Colony women since 2005.  The men were using a veterinary sedative to incapacitate the families and would then rape the women and girls.  Court records indicate that there were 130 victims, though the actual number will never be known and is perceived to be much higher.

Toews' novel is "a reaction through fiction to these real events, and an act of female imagination". While the men of the Colony are off to the city to post bail for their brothers, the rapists, eight women hold a secret meeting to discuss this atrocity and "organize their response".  The narrative is written from the point of view of August, the one man that the women trust to take the minutes of their meetings.

Gripping, riveting, and touching.  Congratulations, Miriam on this wonderful accomplishment.

Canadian readers can buy the book now, it releases in the US in April of 2019.

Women Talking

The sun rises on a quiet June morning in 2009. August Epp sits alone in the hayloft of a barn, anxiously bent over his notebook. He writes quickly, aware that his solitude will soon be broken. Eight women--ordinary grandmothers, mothers and teenagers; yet to August, each one extraordinary-- will climb the ladder into the loft, and the day's true task will begin. This task will be both simple and subversive: August, like the women, is a traditional Mennonite, and he has been asked to record a secret conversation.

Thus begins Miriam Toews' spellbinding novel. Gradually, as we hear the women's vivid voices console, tease, admonish, regale and debate each other, we piece together the reason for the gathering: they have forty-eight hours to make a life-altering choice on behalf of all the women and children in the colony. And like a vast night sky coming into view behind the bright sparks of their voices, we learn of the devastating events that have led to this moment.

Acerbic, funny, tender, sorrowful and wise, Women Talking is composed of equal parts humane love and deep anger. It is award-winning writer Miriam Toews' most astonishing novel to date, containing within its two short days and hayloft setting an expansive, timeless universe of thinking and feeling about women--and men--in our contemporary world.

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MIRIAM TOEWS is the author of five previous bestselling novels: Summer of My Amazing Luck, A Boy of Good Breeding, A Complicated Kindness (Canada Reads 2006, Canada Reads Canadian Bestseller of the Decade 2010), The Flying Troutmans, and Irma Voth, and one work of non-fiction, Swing Low: A Life.

She is a winner of the Governor General’s Award for Fiction, the Libris Award for Fiction Book of the Year, the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, and the Writers Trust Marian Engel/Timothy Findley Award.

Miriam lives in Toronto.