![]() When she was thirty-four her father killed himself. Toews grew up in a remote Canadian Mennonite (an Amish-like Christian religion) community in a loving family of four. But while Louis’ writing extends into broader areas of the political, Toews’ has been focused more intensely on the personal: on grief, humour, sex, and mental health. Both writers have created work at once inspired and confined by intense, real-life family experiences. The work of Miriam Toews is, like that of Louis’, marked by a desire for unaffected honesty, and a discomfort with literary fabrication. ‘I wanted my father to exist, and not someone as a metaphor.’ ‘Who talks about us?’ he remembers thinking. He couldn’t comprehend why these concerns might be considered important when the deprivation in his own home was so stark. Teenage Édouard was baffled to hear this man describing creation of character and structure. Le Clézio won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2008, he saw the acceptance speech on television. ![]() ![]() ![]() Growing up in a brutally poor household in Northern France, there had never been any books in his home, but when J.M.G. Édouard Louis, speaking recently at the London Review Bookshop, described why he writes auto-fiction. ![]()
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