It was at age nine, Toews says, that “a switch went off in my brain and suddenly I started thinking ‘What the heck is going on?’” In her own family. Her mom is quite pregnant with a baby they’ve nicknamed Gord her grandmother “has one foot in the grave.” Which makes Swiv the narrator of this story. The story begins as a letter that Swiv is writing to her dad, who is not in the picture. “That was my central job, to get that voice and that line between joy and grief, between ebullience and exuberance and deep sadness.” With the book dealing with themes of tension - absence and presence, anger and peace - she wanted to get it right. “It was so fun to write Swiv,” Toews says. Which is all to say, much of Toews’ work is drawn from her own well of rich experience: growing up in a Mennonite community, being a young single mother, experiencing the grief of her father’s and sister’s deaths. Interestingly, Toews also wrote letters to the father of her son in the “Open Letters” webzine - she didn’t know where to send them - signing them “X.” She won the Governor General’s Literary Award for her novel “A Complicated Kindness,” about a teenager in a Mennonite community in Manitoba. Her novel “All My Puny Sorrows” drew from the life of her sister, Marjorie, who also committed suicide. There was a memoir of her father, “Swing Low: A Life” he suffered from bipolar disorder and took his own life. This joy at grandmotherhood should not come as a surprise: if there’s anything a reader of Toews knows, it’s that family means everything to her and that her books reflect that. “She loves it … and, you know, just having that massive life force around her, that’s great.”

It’s good for her mother, Elvira, too, who’s now 90. I just love having everybody around,” she says. “It’s just kind of a dream come true for me. Two of them live with Toews and her partner in Toronto in a multi-generational home along with Toews’ own mother, her daughter and her daughter’s partner.

At 57, the author of such powerful and popular books as “A Complicated Kindness” and “All My Puny Sorrows” now has four of them, spread between Toronto and Winnipeg. Miriam Toews is talking about her grandkids.

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