She chose Miriam Toews All My Puny Sorrows because she’d read and liked some of her earlier work, and because the author is, like M–, Canadian. This month, M– chose the book we would read (we take it, roughly, in turns). These are the women who hold me together whose lives I am honoured to share. Yes, it is that cheesy! Our book club, for me, is a little like that cheesy old movie about the ladies who do patchwork together. Women whose strength and love and friendship has kept me going when I could not have persisted on my own. The women in my book club are all dear friends of mine. To laugh and drink coffee and smile at each other. Have I told you that before? We get together once a month to talk about books and life. Also, the book (and my ramblings about reading it) includes discussions of suicide. You can safely read right up till the ‘spoiler alert’ graphic. Those moments are scariest of all.SPOILER ALERT: This long ramble about Miriam Toews’ All My Puny Sorrows includes a discussion of the book’s ending. But even worse than that is when, without anyone even knowing, without a forewarning, the piano shatters inside us. When our skin is taut and the imprint of the piano can be seen through our clothes, can be seen by everyone around us. Random moments can cause the glass piano to push at parts of our skin, to stretch it to its breaking point. The parts that we don’t want to show to the world, but can easily cut right through us and spill onto the pavement. It’s the fears and hopes and dreams and pain and confusion all stirred up inside us. When she hears bottles being thrown into the back of a garbage truck or wind chimes or even a certain type of bird singing she immediately thinks it’s the piano breaking.Ī child laughed this morning, she says, a little girl here visiting her father, but I didn’t know it was laughter, I thought it was the sound of glass shattering and I clutched my stomach thinking oh no, this is it.” I ask her what kind of piano it is and she tells me that it’s an old upright Heintzman that used to be a player piano but that the player mechanism has been removed and the whole thing has been turned into glass, even the keys. But mostly she’s terrified that it will break inside her. She tells me that it’s squeezed right up against the lower right side of her stomach, that sometimes she can feel the hard edges of it pushing at her skin, that she’s afraid it will push through and she’ll bleed to death. “Then Elf tells me that she has a glass piano inside her.
This week’s Wordsmith Wednesday comes from Miriam Toews’ All My Puny Sorrows.
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