Author Miriam Toews

Though Miriam Toews would probably deny it, she’s kind of a big deal. An award-winning novelist and practitioner of non-fiction, Toews (pronounced “tayvz”) is an immensely talented writer with a rare gift for telling stories that are simultaneously heartrending and hilarious. Born and raised in the Mennonite community of Steinbach, Manitoba, the Winnipeg-based novelist hit the big time with her 2004 novel A Complicated Kindness, a surprise bestseller that went on to win the Governor General's Award for English fiction.

“After A Complicated Kindness, there was a ton of stuff involved around that,” Toews explains. “A lot of travelling, and a lot of promoting that book. Then that died down and I went away for a bit and was in a film. It took me a while to kind of get that whole experience out of my head.”

Four years after publishing her last novel, Toews is back with her latest. The Flying Troutmans (Knopf, 275 pp.) is, like its predecessors, an exploration of fractured families. When 28 year old Hattie Troutman gets an S.O.S. call in Paris from her 11 year-old niece Thebes, she realizes that her older sister Min is sicker than she had realized. Hopping on the first plane home, she arrives just in time to check Min into a psychiatric ward. Finding herself the temporary guardian of the talkative young girl and her sullen, teenaged brother Logan, Hattie does what any level-headed adult would do in her position: she sets off on a road trip to find the children’s long-lost father. As this accidental family travels the roads of America in a beat-up Ford Aerostar, they gradually come to grips with the loss, longing and confusion of losing a loved one to mental illness. Despite this heavy premise, the book is surprisingly light and funny.

While her writing has been called darkly comic, the balance Toews strikes between comedy and tragedy is more soulful than sarcastic. “Whatever comedy there may be in it is drawn from ordinary life and from the characters,” she says of her work. “There is an element of hope and lightness, of optimism in some way, even if it’s bleak.”

Her commitment to writing stories steeped in reality has meant that Toews inevitably allows elements of her own life to pop up in her stories – including her children. She admits that Logan’s absentee father and obsession with basketball are characteristics shared with her son. “Certainly my son’s life is much different,” she says. “He’s a real-live human being with all sorts of other things going on, but those aspects of the Logan character were drawn from him.

“I go to such lengths to emphasize that they’re not drawn completely from my life or from the people that I know,” she adds. “My kids are older now, they’re all grown up. But the talky nature of Thebes and her kind of hip hop, slangy way of talking, that was taken directly from my own daughter when she was that age, and it always struck me as funny and kind of touching.”

One aspect of Toews’s life that is noticeably absent from The Flying Troutmans is her religious faith. “I felt that I had dealt for myself in my own life with that type of religious question, with my Mennonite background,” she says. “I said what I needed to say about it in my last book. In my mind, I wanted to put that behind me, because the reality of my life, now, and for the last however many years, is that I’m not a religious person and it’s not something I think about a great deal. It’s just that for A Complicated Kindness, it was one of central themes.”

Having experienced tremendous success with her last book, Toews says that she was a little intimidated as she started writing The Flying Troutmans. “It was a little difficult thinking of those perceived expectations,” she admits. “But eventually I realized that it didn’t matter. I needed to write the book that I wanted to write at that particular time in my life.”

With The Flying Troutmans, Toews has written another smart, funny book that deserves to find a wide readership. Though it lacks the distinctive voice of A Complicated Kindness, it has lovable characters, strong pacing and her signature balance of laughter and tears. “It’s just how I write, how I see the world and how I look at life,” she says. “I think of it as a very funny place and a very tragic place; heartbreaking and difficult but also very amusing, and often at the same time.”

The WordFest: Banff-Calgary International Writers Festival presents Miriam Toews on Wednesday, September 17, 7:30 p.m., in the John Dutton Theatre (W.R. Castell Central Library).