Book Club Discussion Guide
About the Author
All My Puny Sorrows
by Kathryn Stockett
Miriam Toews is a Canadian writer of Mennonite descent. She grew up in
Steinbach, Manitoba and has lived in Montreal and London, before settling in
Winnipeg, Manitoba.
Toews studied at the University of Manitoba and the University of King's College
in Halifax, and has also worked as a freelance newspaper and radio journalist.
Her non-fiction book "Swing Low: A Life" was a memoir of her father, a victim of
lifelong depression. Her 2004 novel "A Complicated Kindness" was her
breakthrough work, spending over a year on the Canadian bestseller lists and
winning the Governor General's Award for English Fiction. The novel, about a
teenage girl who longs to escape her small Russian Mennonite town and hang
out with Lou Reed in the slums of New York City, was also nominated for the
Giller Prize and was the winning title in the 2006 edition of Canada Reads.
Book Club Discussion Guide
A series of letters she wrote in 2000 to the father of her son were published on
the website www.openletters.net and were profiled on the radio show This
American Life in an episode about missing parents.
In 2007 she made her screen debut in the Mexican film "Luz silenciosa" directed
by Carlos Reygadas, which screened at the Cannes Film Festival.
In Sept. 2008, Knopf Canada published her novel "The Flying Troutmans", about
a 28-year-old woman from Manitoba who takes her 15-year-old nephew and 11year-old niece on a road trip to California after their mentally ill mother has been
hospitalized.
The book, Irma Voth, was released in April 2011. Her latest book, All My Puny
Sorrows, was published in April 2014.
Book Club Discussion Guide
About the Book
All My Puny Sorrows
by Kathryn Stockett
You won’t forget Elf and Yoli, two smart and loving sisters. Elfrieda, a worldrenowned pianist, glamorous, wealthy, happily married: she wants to die.
Yolandi, divorced, broke, sleeping with the wrong men as she tries to find true
love: she desperately wants to keep her older sister alive. Yoli is a beguiling
mess, wickedly funny even as she stumbles through life struggling to keep her
teenage kids and mother happy, her exes from hating her, her sister from
killing herself and her own heart from breaking.
But Elf’s latest suicide attempt is a shock: she is three weeks away from the
opening of her highly anticipated international tour. Her long-time agent has
been calling and neither Yoli nor Elf’s loving husband knows what to tell him.
Can she be nursed back to “health” in time? Does it matter? As the situation
becomes ever more complicated, Yoli faces the most terrifying decision of her
life.
All My Puny Sorrows, at once tender and unquiet, offers a profound reflection
on the limits of love, and the sometimes unimaginable challenges we
experience when childhood becomes a new country of adult commitments and
responsibilities. In her beautifully rendered new novel, Miriam Toews gives us
a startling demonstration of how to carry on with hope and love and the
business of living even when grief loads the heart.
Book Club Discussion Guide
Discussion
Questions
All My Puny Sorrows
by Kathryn Stockett
* Note that these questions reveal much of the novel’s plot; to preserve
your reading pleasure, please don’t look at these questions until after you’ve
finished reading the book.
1. How did you experience the book? Were you engaged immediately, or did it
take you a while to
"get into it"? How did you feel reading it—amused,
sad, disturbed, confused, bored...?
2. Describe the main characters—personality traits, motivations, inner qualities.
• Why do characters do what they do?
• Are their actions justified?
• Describe the dynamics between characters
(in a marriage, family, or friendship).
• How has the past shaped their lives?
• Do you admire or disapprove of them?
• Do they remind you of people you know?
3. Do the main characters change by the end of
the book? Do they grow or mature? Do they learn something about themselves
and how the world works?
4. Is the plot engaging—does the story interest you? Is this a plot-driven book: a
fast-paced page-turner? Or does the story unfold slowly with a focus on
character development? Were you surprised by the plot's complications? Or did
you find it predictable, even formulaic?
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5. Talk about the book's structure. Is it a continuous story...or interlocking short
stories? Does the time-line more forward chronologically...or back and forth
between past and present? Does the author use a single viewpoint or shifting
viewpoints? Why might the author have chosen to tell the story the way he or she
did—and what difference does it make in the way you read or understand it?
6. What main ideas—themes—does the author explore? (Consider the title, often
a clue to a theme.) Does the author use symbols to reinforce the main ideas?
7. What passages strike you as insightful, even profound? Perhaps a bit of dialog
that's funny or poignant or that encapsulates a character? Maybe there's a
particular comment that states the book's thematic concerns?
8. Is the ending satisfying? If so, why? If not, why not...and how would you
change it?
9. If you could ask the author a question, what would you ask? Have you read
other books by the same author? If so how does this book compare. If not, does
this book inspire you to read others?
10. Has this novel changed you—broadened your perspective? Have you
learned something new or been exposed to different ideas about people or a
certain part of the world?
Book Club Discussion Guide
About the Author
All My Puny Sorrows
by Kathryn Stockett
“Toews is an extraordinarily gifted writer, with unsentimental compassion for her
people and an honest understanding of their past, the tectonic shifts of their
present and variables of their future.” —The Globe and Mail
"Toews is a writer of considerable subtlety and grace, with a gift for bringing
flashes of lightness, even humor, to the darkest of tales." --The Millions
"[A] masterful, original investigation into love, loss and survival." —Kirkus
(Starred)
"[A] triumph in its depiction of the love the sisters share."—Publishers Weekly
(Starred Review)
"Toews writes with a sharp and piercing eye, offering characters and descriptions
which are so odd and yet so spot-on that the reader has to laugh, albeit
reluctantly." —Booklist
"A touching tribute and a captivating novel." —BUST
"[Miriam Toews] has a wry, funny voice that is the readers’ steady companion.
She also has an eye for the absurd and a perfect tragicomedic timing in delivery."
—Christian Century