Women Talking by Miriam Toews

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

“Where is evil? In the world outside or the world inside?”

Women Talking was so heavy but beautiful. As someone who identifies as both a Christian and a feminist, or as someone who at least strives for the heart of those unfortunately loaded words (Love! Equality!), I found this profoundly moving.

“I believe that my soul, my essence, my intangible energy, is the presence of God within me, and that by bringing peace to my soul I am honouring God. If I can understand how these crimes may have occurred I am able to forgive these men. And I am almost able, certainly from a distance, to pity these men, and to love them. Love is good, and better than retaliation.”

How do we square our faith with the all-too-common abuses of those who claim to share our faith and carry out horrific abuses in the name of it? It is a perplexing confrontation that I believe every Christian (regardless of the variety of Christianity they identify with) must face head-on at some point in their spiritual journey.

“We are wasting time... by passing this burden, this sack of stones, from one to the next, by pushing our pain away. We mustn’t do this. We mustn’t play Hot Potato with our pain. Let’s absorb it ourselves, each of us... Let’s inhale it, let’s digest it, let’s process it into fuel.”

I love each of the fictional women Teows has created. Their differences and discourse seemed so genuine that I often felt I was in the hay loft with them. There are no perfect solutions to the atrocities and hypocrisies they discussed. We can only follow their example, speaking with one another and deciding what path is best for ourselves and those entrusted to our care. We should also refrain from condemning others who choose to follow a different path to healing.

“The women in the loft have taught me that consciousness is resistance, that faith is action, that time is running out. But can faith also be to return, to stay, to serve?”

This novel was inspired by a true tragedy that occurred in the Manitoba Mennonite community in Bolivia. I saw a critical review saying the book might work better for readers who “go into it expecting a religiophilosophical analysis, instead of a feminist novelization of a true story.” I agree with that criticism, but as someone who read it both expecting/desiring the religiophilosophical analysis and relating to it, I loved the book.

“... there’s no plot, we’re only women talking.”

Toews herself described the novel as “a reaction through fiction” to the events in Manitoba and “an act of the female imagination.” It does not seem like she ever promoted it as an eventful dramatization, although I suppose the publishers could have been guilty of that in their desire to sell it. I was worried it would come across as exploitative, but I think it was handled tactfully. I do not think anyone could have written this so poignantly if they had not been able to empathize through experience with the lifestyle of the real women who inspired the fictional ones. “In writing the novel, she says, ‘there was rage and heartbreak mixed with feelings of faith,’ and that the story contained all the questions she had about her own Mennonite community: ‘When I became a teenager, I started to understand the profound hypocrisy, the sanctimony, the authoritarianism, this culture of control, or rules, of punishment, all of these things that seemed to me to be so far, far away from the presence of God. It was that conflict that has enraged me for so many years.’”

If you are not interested in religion, faith, and spirituality, and how these things are tested in the face of adversity, you probably will not like this novel. If you are antagonistic towards hard decisions driven by religion, faith, and spirituality, you most likely will loathe the book. But if you are fascinated or inspired by Socratic spiritual discussions, Women Talking is wonderful.

“Why does the mention of love, the memory of love, the memory of love lost, the promise of love, the end of love, the absence of love, the burning, burning need for love, need to love, result in so much violence?”

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𝓟.𝓢. This review was crossposted from Goodreads because it contains actual thoughts rather than a typically facetious single-sentence remark. View all my book ratings and pointless takes on Goodreads or The StoryGraph.