“They’re both just incredible actors, and they were just fantastic collaborators,” McGowan said.

Sitting down to speak with McGowan, Gadon, and Pill, the director had a lot of praise for the two stars and what they brought to the roles. It is instead an engrossing and hugely satisfying dramatisation of an unimaginable request.All My Puny Sorrows opens in theatres this week, and it cuts to the heart of a mother and her daughters dealing with painful family trauma that has haunted them for years.īased on the award-winning novel by Miriam Toews, All My Puny Sorrows is director Michael McGowan’s touching, sorrowful, and uniquely humourous drama starring Sarah Gadon and Alison Pill as sisters Elf and Yoli. Because this is not a story built around twists and turns. It is vulnerable to accusations of plotlessness, yes, but to criticise Toews for that is to miss the point entirely. The sisters here have been shaped by their upbringing in a small town which styles itself as a “refuge from the vices of the world” but which, in actuality, is little more than a “squad of perpetual disapprovers”.Īll My Puny Sorrows is thus a tonal masterclass of a novel, a sad, sad book which is compulsive reading because of how it acknowledges humour as a pivot-point in the seesaw of dignity. The author further draws on her Mennonite background and the restrictions of religious fundamentalism, something which has informed much of her previous work.

It is an approach which demands that one empathise equally with Yoli’s exasperation and with Elf’s desire to “slowly evaporate into space”. Much like Swing Low: A Life (2000), the memoir Toews wrote about her father, who also killed himself in 1998, All My Puny Sorrows exudes a rawness which quickly earns the reader’s trust. The novel is as much a work of truth as it is of imagination. Such thinking is much in evidence in All My Puny Sorrows. It is an unexpected tone for a novel not just about depression and the moral quagmire of assisted dying, but for one based on the author’s own experience of her sister’s suicide in 2010.Īlways a highly autobiographical writer, Toews has often spoken about the categorisation of fiction and non-fiction, distinctions she sees as mostly irrelevant. While never making light of the seriousness of Elf’s situation, she nonetheless delivers a story which is laugh-out-loud hilarious. Luckily getting on with it is exactly what Toews does.

My puny little sorrows