Will I love Women Talking?

I love Miriam Toews’ work and had no clue about this book’s subject matter when I first picked it up. The premise: over the course of forty-eight hours, eight Mennonite women secretly gather to decide the fate of all women and children in their remote colony. Since the women are illiterate, their conversation is recorded (and the book narrated) by gentle misfit August Epp.

We learn with increasing horror what has driven the women to this subversive precipice, and we learn in the book’s forward that Toews is responding, however fictionally, to actual events that transpired at the Mennonite Manitoba… show more.

This is a novel of violence and misogyny, but it is also strangely uplifting and inspirational.

A group of women brought up in a cult discover a horrifying secret about the men in their lives that leaves them with two choices: go or stay. Their dilemma is complicated by their extreme isolation; none of them can read or write and they speak a language distinct to their religious sect. It is told from the POV of a recently returned outcast whose presence is a mystery until the last page. 

As an author, I always pay attention to setting and scene changes in a book. But in Women Talking, there essentially were no scene changes. Yet it works.

Based on a horrific true story of violence and betrayal perpetrated on several Mennonite women by men of their community, the book is a fictionalized hours-long discussion by the women as they imagine a way forward. The stakes are enormous.

In this discussion, words matter to these women who have never been allowed to attend school but who want to adhere to the tenets of their religion, and as a writer… show more.

There is subtle genius in the way Miriam Toews pays such close attention to the humanity of her often heartbreaking characters while also being dryly funny. Set in a closed, conservative Mennonite community, the story unfolds as “minutes” taken by a young man as he listens to a group of women from the community who have discovered they were drugged and assaulted while sleeping, by men they know. (Their fathers, sons, husbands, and friends.) The story is based on a real case, and while the details are chillingly horrific, Toews finds a way for the characters to talk about these… show more.