You talked about “get into that deep place where you have the questions.” It seems that questions, the act of questioning, of answering and not answering, of call and response, became the very architecture of your novel. The Rumpus: At The Center for Fiction, you mentioned that hearing about the rapes in Bolivia raised a lot of questions for you. Recently, Toews and I discussed through email how she built tension in a novel about a single conversation, the concept of “restorative justice” in the Mennonite community, and the way her own mother’s resilience helped her write Women Talking. She has won numerous literary prizes, including the Governor General’s Award for Fiction, the Writers’ Trust Engel/Findley Award, the Libris Award for Fiction Book of the Year, and the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. Miriam Toews now lives in Toronto and is the author of seven novels, including Summer of My Amazing Luck, A Boy of Good Breeding, and A Complicated Kindness, as well as the nonfiction book, Swing Low: A Life. While the book does not save the women in Bolivia, it does stand in solidarity with them, it does imagine a revolutionary new future for them. By focusing not on the rapes themselves, but rather on the conversation that comes after, Toews manages to find hope in a seemingly hopeless situation. It is hard not to look at the violence in Bolivia in relation to the sexual abuse that has spurred the #MeToo movement and to violence against women around the globe. While Women Talking examines a small enclave of extreme gender inequality, its reach extends far beyond this pocket of Mennonites in Bolivia. In Women Talking, she highlights how internalized the rigid rules of this society are for the Mennonite women, as well as how hard it is to speak up against them. Raised in a Mennonite community in Manitoba, Canada, Toews has an insider’s understanding of the patriarchal and authoritarian system that the women in Bolivia face. The purpose of the meeting is to debate their choices: should the women do nothing in response to the rapes, stay and fight the men, or leave the community altogether? The novel, based on true events, centers around a fictional, clandestine conversation between three generations of women in the aftermath of the violence. Toews puts them to the test, asking them to confront the most unimaginable horror: the systematic rape of women by a group of men in a small, isolated Mennonite colony in Bolivia. Books are what don’t save us.” She echoed this sentiment years later in a recent conversation with Meg Wolitzer at The Center for Fiction: “Words can save our lives… and also can’t.” The very title of her stunning new book, Women Talking, tells us this novel is about the power of words, of women’s words in particular. In her deeply affecting novel about her sister’s suicide, All My Puny Sorrows, Miriam Toews writes, “Books are what save us.
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