A Complicated Kindness

[vaneramos]

I just finished reading A Complicated Kindness by Miriam Toews, winner of the 2004 Governor General's Award for fiction. It takes the form of a 16-year-old girl's memoir in a small Mennonite town in southern Manitoba. While reliving memories of her older sister's and mother's disappearances, she stumbles toward her own inevitable collision with the community. I don't know whether I'll call this one of my favourite novels; it hits close to so much of my own grief. It is so real. Nomi's path from believing her sister will burn in hell to rejection of church and faith resonates with my own journey. Toews evokes the teen character with precision that lucidly resembles my own daughters in rebellion against Christian schooling and upbringing. I read it within 48 hours.

Perhaps this novel will help me find a way to resume writing about my experience with the evangelical faith and ex-gay movement. I have begun to understand why it is so hard to write, and accept the resistance as natural. I am beginning to find some simple happiness and confidence in this life. Remembrance feels unpleasant, but writing involves living life twice, as Natalie Goldberg puts it. If I choose to let old feelings go, there will not be as much to write about. It is an option.

Comments

[liadra.livejournal.com]

I just finished reading "Sarah's Key" by Tatiana de Rosnay, about a young Jewish girl in Paris and the Velodrome d'Hiver in 1942. I hadn't known a thing about this event and the French participation in the atrocities towards Jews in the war. I'm still just a little unsettled by it, but it was a good read. All this to say that sometimes a book brings you through something, and sometimes it brings you to something. Deep thoughts tonight. Be well.

[apel.livejournal.com]

I started responding to this entry but the comment turned out to be much more about me than about you, so I put it in my own LJ.

If I had been able to just let the old feelings and memories go, I would probably have chosen that. I couldn't and besides I needed a lot more skills for living, so that wasn't an option for me. No matter what you decide or not, I'm pretty sure I'll be here reading your entries and tweets. You matter to me.

[ghostsandrobots.livejournal.com]

Maybe writing about those old feelings could be a way of saying goodbye to them. That way you could have your novel and get rid of it too.

Thanks for giving me another title to look for in the library.

A Complicated Kindness

[(Anonymous)]

I read this book back in 2006, and fell in love with Toews' Nomi. The feelings, the thoughts, the inability to process it all in any sort of logical way until the only solution seems to be rebellion -- these are some of the defining elements of my own coming of age years. I don't think I'll ever understand myself as a lesbian or even as a person when I think in relation to my religious past (and my longing for a spiritual future). That painful history is a re-occurring memory, that I'm afraid to forget for fear that it may repeat itself in the present. But I very much understand the desire to let the feelings go; there is often little peace for an artistic mind.

Sarah S.