Literary Birthday – 21 May – Miriam Toews

Happy Birthday, Miriam Toews, born on 21 May 1964.

Miriam Toews Quotes

1. It’s the idea of writing as a way of controlling the narrative, of taking everything—the chaos of the swirl, the wind of all our ideas and thoughts—and crafting something that makes sense. (Yale Review)
2. When I started writing, the work was an act of rebellion. An act of subversiveness. But also a philosophical one. (Yale Review)
3. Writing is how I process things, how I stay sane, alive, and healthy. I have to write. I have to make sense of everything: trauma, life, absurdity, pain, joy through narrative. I don’t necessarily have to publish, but I definitely have to write. (AS Journal)
4. That’s just what writing is. A holler from one world to another or to many others… just an inquiry, a connection, an effort to prove you’re not alone. (Girls On The Page)
5. I do write very autobiographically, and I feel memory is such a fluid watery thing. The freedom of fiction is something that I love. If I’m writing fiction, then I can change things around chronologically or even the details I might remember, I can embellish or elaborate on. It’s always a combination for me of so-called fact, which I guess you could think of as my memory of things, and the freedom. (Guts Magazine)
6. That is a function of my writing and writing in general … to create a conversation. In that conversation, we can hopefully be moved to think and to be less afraid of the various things that are haunting us. (Guts Magazine)
7. I always start with character, but in this case, I also had the intent of working on a road story. I know that doesn’t help much in terms of advice, but I guess I would say knowing and being honest with your characters is more important than ….plot – I’m never been a big plot fan. (McnalleyRobinson)

Miriam Toews is a Canadian writer and author of 10 books. Her internationally acclaimed and bestselling novels include Fight Night, Women Talking, All My Puny Sorrows, A Boy of Good Breeding, and Summer of My Amazing Luck. Her memoir A Truce That Is Not Peace was a finalist for the 2025 National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography. She has won many literary prizes, including the Governor General’s Award for Fiction and the Writers’ Trust Engel/Findley Award for her body of work. Toews is also a three-time finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and a two-time winner of the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. Her daughter, Georgia Toews, and son, Owen Toews, are both writers.

Source for image: Larry D. Moore, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Miriam_Toews_2025_Texas_Book_Festival.jpg

by Amanda Patterson

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