Synopses & Reviews
After her father took his own life in 1998, Miriam Toews decided to face her confusion and pain straight on. In writing her fathers memoir, she was motivated by two primary goals: For her own sake, she needed to understand, or at least accept, her fathers final decision. For her fathers sake, she needed to honour him, to elucidate his life and to demonstrate its worth.
Apart from its brief prologue and epilogue, Swing Low is written entirely from Mel Toewss perspective. Miriam Toews has her father tell his story from bed as he waits in a Steinbach hospital to be transferred to a psychiatric facility in Winnipeg. Mel turns to writing to make sense of his condition, to review his life in the hope of seeing it more clearly. He remembers himself as an anxious child, the son of a despondent father and an alcoholic mother, who never once made him feel loved. At seventeen he was diagnosed with manic depression (now known as bipolar disorder). His psychiatrists predictions were grim: Mel shouldnt count on marrying, starting a family or holding down a job. With great courage and determination, Mel went on to do all three: he married his childhood sweetheart, had two happy daughters and was a highly respected and beloved teacher for forty years.
Although Mel was able to keep his disorder hidden from the community, his family frequently witnessed his unravelling. Over the years this schism between his public and private life grew wider. An outgoing and tireless trailblazer at school, he often collapsed into silence and despair at home. Ironically, in trying to win his familys love through hard work and accomplishments, he deprived them of what they yearned for most: his presence, his voice. Once he retired from teaching - "the daily ritual of stepping outside himself" - Mel lost his creative outlet and, with it, his hope.
In the Globe and Mail, author Moira Farr described Swing Low as "audacious, original and profoundly moving." She added: "Getting into the head of your own father - your own largely silent, mentally ill father, who killed himself - has to be a kind of literary high-wire act that few would dare to try.… Healing is a likely outcome of a book imbued with the righteous anger, compassion and humanity of Swing Low."
Review
"Audacious, original and profoundly moving....A deeply affecting work ....This is a document for the living, and its virtues are more than literary; healing is a likely outcome of a book imbued with the righteous anger, compassion and humanity of Swing Low." The Globe and Mail
Review
"A fine, fluent book teeming with anecdote and incident, echoes and images...Swing Low is a detailed, textured portrait, not just of human life, but of a community, of small-town, Mennonite Manitoba." Quill & Quire
Review
"Toews' novelistic skills (the award-winning comic novels Summer of My Amazing Luck and A Boy of Good Breeding) are richly apparent in her evocative characterizations and in the deft drama of the narrative." Toronto Star
Synopsis
From the bestselling author of
A Complicated Kindness comes an extraordinary memoir about her father and his struggle with manic depression.
One morning, Mel Toews put on his coat and hat and walked out of town, prepared to die. A loving husband and father, faithful member of the Mennonite church, and immensely popular school teacher, he was a pillar of his close-knit community. Yet after a lifetime of struggle, he could no longer face the darkness of manic depression. In Swing Low his daughter Miriam recounts Mel's life as she imagines he would have told it, right up to the day he took his final walk. A gracefully written and compassionate recounting of a man's battle with depression in a small Mennonite community, Swing Low is a moving meditation on illness, family, faith and love.
About the Author
Miriam Toews (pronounced tâves) was born in 1964 in the small Mennonite town of Steinbach, Manitoba. She left Steinbach at eighteen, living in Montreal and London and touring Europe before coming back to Manitoba, where she earned her B.A. in film studies at the University of Manitoba. Later she packed up with her children and partner and moved to Halifax to attend the University of Kings College, where she received her bachelors degree in journalism. Upon returning to Winnipeg with her family in 1991, she freelanced at the CBC, making radio documentaries. When her youngest daughter started nursery school, Toews decided it was time to try writing a novel.
Miriam Toewss first novel, Summer of My Amazing Luck, was published in 1996; it was nominated for the Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour and won the John Hirsch Award. Published two years later, her second novel, A Boy of Good Breeding, won the McNally Robinson Book of the Year Award. Her most recent novel is the bestselling A Complicated Kindness, which was a Giller Prize finalist and won the Governor Generals Literary Award for Fiction. Toews has also written for the CBC, This American Life (on National Public Radio), Saturday Night, Geist, Canadian Geographic, Open Letters and The New York Times Magazine, and she has won the National Magazine Award Gold Medal for Humour.
Published in 2000, Swing Low: A Life won both the McNally Robinson Book of the Year Award and the Alexander Kennedy Isbister Award for Non-Fiction. The book garnered praise for, among other things, the remarkable courage and candour Toews displayed in writing about her fathers struggle with bipolar disorder and his suicide. In an interview with Macleans, she said, “Keeping this hush-hush, regarding it as a shameful thing — I knew how destructive that kind of silence is. I wanted his life to be known and honoured.”
In writing about her father, Toews was also driven by a need to alleviate her own pain and bewilderment. “When somebody you know and love has committed suicide its so hard to understand. You just dont know how it could have happened. You want to be inside that persons head so you can figure out why this person made this choice.… I wanted to be inside his head, and in order to do that I had to become him,” she says on powells.com.
Reading Group Guide
1.
Swing Low is a portrait of a human life but also of a small town at a particular point in time. What factors do you think may have exacerbated Mels struggle with bipolar disorder? Consider, for instance, traditional gender roles, aspects of the Mennonite religion and the treatment of mental illness.
2. At the beginning of the book, Mel describes his writing as a "series of jerky stills, courtesy of my renegade mind." How would you describe the symptoms of bipolar disorder based on Mels account of his life and inner world? How is his mental state occasionally revealed in the way in which he expresses himself?
3. What role does the idea of home play in Swing Low? Consider, for instance, Mels recurring dream, his feelings toward his pink house, his memories from childhood and his description of depression as "not feeling at home in this world."
4. What is the authors role in the book outside of the brief prologue and epilogue? How would you characterize the relationship between Miriam and her father based on Mels account?
5. For those who have read A Complicated Kindness, what similarities and differences do you see between Mel and Ray? Elvira and Trudie? Steinbach and East Village?
6. What is the relationship between loss and knowledge in both Swing Low and A Complicated Kindness? Discuss the ways in which Mel Toews and Nomi Nickel value words. How do they use humour?
7. What significance do flowers, sunshine and travel have in the book? How does Mel occasionally move toward freedom? How does he resist it? Discuss the moments in which Elvira inspires him with her courage and high spirits.
8. Mel writes: "I vacillated wildly between thinking everything mattered, that every word, every action, every task was important, to thinking that nothing at all mattered, that everything was futile." Also: "I felt there was no hope for the world, that evil would inevitably triumph over good, and that there was, therefore, no point in striving for goodness. And yet I also felt that the struggle to be good was the purpose of life. Certainly of my life." What contradictions does Mel negotiate throughout his life?
9. "Im sixty-two years old and still wanting my mother to hold me in her arms just once and tell me that she loves me." Does Mel ever forgive his mother? Does he at least achieve some measure of understanding her?
10. Swing Low has been called a “genre-bender.” What qualities of the book strike you as characteristic of fiction, of creative non-fiction and of traditional biography?
Author Q&A
The critics praised your audaciousness in writing from your father’s perspective. What were the biggest challenges in this regard?Maintaining his voice, taking into account his whole personality — not just his illness — and making sure I didn’t project my own attitudes into the narrative.
Have you received any feedback from individuals struggling with bipolar disorder or those in the mental healthcare community?
Yes, I’ve received a lot of feedback from both of those groups of people, and it’s been very positive. After my dad’s death I read everything I could about mental illness and suicide, trying to find something to help me make sense of things, something I could relate to, so if my book can help somebody else in the same way, then I feel that it was a worthwhile thing to do.
Why did you choose the title Swing Low?
For two reasons: Because it’s the name of a song, a Negro spiritual, that my dad knew and liked, and I think he would have appreciated its message: Swing low, sweet chariot, coming forth to carry me home. Also, it seemed fitting, the word "Swing" and the word "Low" as in mood swings and low moods, or depression.
What did your father think about you being a writer?
We didn’t talk about it much, but he was always supportive. He was a writer, too. He understood its appeal and its challenges. Reading and writing was just as important to him as it is to me.
What novelistic skills did you draw upon in writing this book?
I’m not sure. I guess just the idea of a strong central character telling his story in a way that was compelling and with a voice that was honest.
Had you already conceived of the idea for A Complicated Kindness when you wrote Swing Low?
No, not really. It came later.
You once said of A Complicated Kindness, "loss inspired the story, loss with no answers. I think I needed to put that on Nomi. She was going to be the person who would take me through the process of dealing with loss." Could you elaborate on this comment?
Well, there are so many questions and what-ifs surrounding suicide. In 2002, a very close cousin of mine also committed suicide. I thought about my dad and my cousin and everything seemed so hopeless and futile and unbearably sad, and there were no really conclusive answers to that big question: how did this happen? So, you just have to move through it, drift with it, and I think it might have helped me a bit to attach myself, in a way, to a character like Nomi, who was dealing with a bewildering type of grief, and by doing so feel a little less alone with my own. It sounds a little
flaky to say that I created an imaginary character to be a close friend during a really bad time; I realize that. And Nomi is dealing with something else entirely, but it’s something that also makes very little sense to her.
Which non-fiction authors have been most influential to your own writing?
I don’t know if they’ve influenced my own writing or not, but I sure do like the literary biographies that Graham Robb has written, ones on Balzac and Rimbaud, for example, and also the work of Peter Guralnick. I just recently read a book, non-fiction, called Random Family by Adrian Nicole
LeBlanc, about a couple of Puerto Rican families living in the Bronx, and I thought it was brilliant. LeBlanc spent ten years documenting the lives of these families, but the book reads like a novel, a very well written one.
If you could have written one non-fiction book in history, what would it be?
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men by James Agee.
Do you have any plans to write more non-fiction?
Yes, I really enjoy writing non-fiction. But who knows what will happen.