Miriam Toews People Get Nervous When They Assume They’ve Read the Classics


Can a great book be poorly written? What other criteria can overcome bad writing?

It’s pretty hard to make up for bad prose.

Describe your ideal reading experience (when, where, what, how).

Always, in bed, alone. A new fiction by a writer I love like Laura van den Berg, with a good lamp, under a warm duvet, with a gentle breeze of Terrence Mallick waving my curtains.

What is your favorite book that no one has heard of?

I have to say that my son’s former high school basketball teammate’s father is “Ellen’s Eyes,” a beautiful, sad, and weird book written by David Scott. There are no margins or paragraph breaks. David and I were always at the games, but we didn’t sit down together. I was very curious about him. Every time the referees whistled or there was a break in the game, David would read, even if it was only for one minute or 20 seconds. Finally, I mustered up the courage to go up to him and talk to him. In fact, the only thing we talked about was books. It was a great antidote to parents screaming in the stands. The game has been a nice, impressive backdrop for our book conversations. David told me he lived outside the city, in the woods. He gave me a copy of “Ellen’s Eyes” in the last game of the season, and I never saw it again. Then I heard that he died. Years later, his son gave my son a painting by David, and it’s on the wall of my son’s living room. A picture of Winnipeg’s cityscape with the Assiniboine River in the foreground, showing things in the river that are normally invisible to us.

Which writers are particularly good at mother-daughter relationships?

Toni Morrison, Claire Cameron, Elena Ferrante, Mona Simpson, Alice Munro, Elizabeth Strout…

Has a book ever brought you closer to or come between you?

When I was 18, my boyfriend and I were hitchhiking around Europe. We had very little money and were always cold and hungry. We were in Oxford, pretending to be college students there. My boyfriend just found out that John Fowles has signed his new book at Blackwell. My boyfriend insisted on getting the book, I think it was “Mantis” and he had it signed. I was very angry. I sat outside on the pavement and refused to go inside. It was a hardcover book, it was expensive, we could eat for a week with the money he spent, and it was also heavy and we had backpacks that were already heavy. I was angry. We fought over this book all over Western Europe. And now I have no idea where he is. When my boyfriend and I broke up, we quarreled again over who was the replica of Italo Calvino’s “If You Were a Traveler on a Winter’s Night,” and who should have it. In the end, my boyfriend was so eager to get the job done with me: “Take it. Just take it, goodbye.”



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