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“I think in my work, and in my life, I’ve always been attempting to, as they used to say, stick it to the man.” “I’ve always been trying to challenge the patriarchy, specifically of my Mennonite community, but I’m concerned with the suppression of girls and women especially, and any place in the world that falls under fundamentalist, authoritarian thinking,” says Toews. Extremist, closed comm­unities are ripe for violence The details were shocking but these types of crimes have always occurred in places like this. Engaging in a two-day long Socratic dialogue on forgiveness, innocence and love is flat-out transgressive. Animals”, simply gathering without permission is an act of subversion. In a place where, as one of them puts it, “women live out their days as mute, submissive, and obedient servants. She kept wondering: “Then what?” What do the women do after they learn the truth of these violations, this attack of body and faith? In her version, they meet secretively in a hayloft, perched on milk buckets, and talk – and talk, and talk. But Toews never stopped thinking about the women of Manitoba Colony. That book became a bestseller in 2013, nominated for the Folio prize and the Wellcome prize.

The Bolivia story was set aside as Toews answered an urgent need to write All My Puny Sorrows, a tragicomic story of one sister’s life and death, told by the one left behind. As Women Talking sat nascent in Toews’s mind, her sister Marjorie killed herself on the railway tracks in Steinbach where her father, Melvin, had done the same 12 years earlier. Could be right out of The Handmaid’s Tale.”īut the timing of the release is coincidence, not prescience, because the novel was a long time coming. Comparisons to the newly hot The Handmaid’s Tale were already likely (not just bonnets but the patriarchy) and became inevitable when Margaret Atwood tweeted: “ Don’t miss this one!. The slim book drops into the cultural conversation around sexual assault like an exclamation mark: “#MennoniteMeToo” remarked one reader. It’s a dense, eerie, darkly funny novel that reads like a tightly constructed short story. Toews’s eighth book, Women Talking, is a fictional account of eight women gathering in the wake of the men’s arrests to decide a course of action. Rigid and righteous … the Mennonite Heritage Village in Steinbach, Manitoba.