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Édouard Louis, speaking recently at the London Review Bookshop, described why he writes auto-fiction Growing up in a brutally poor household in Northern France, there had never been any books in his home, but when JMG Le Clézio won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2008, he saw the acceptance speech on television Teenage Édouard was baffled to hear this man describing creation of character and structure He couldn’t comprehend why these concerns might be considered important when the deprivation in his own home was so stark ‘Who talks about us?’ he remembers thinking ‘I wanted my father to exist, and not someone as a metaphor’   The work of Miriam Toews is, like that of Louis’, marked by a desire for unaffected honesty, and a discomfort with literary fabrication Both writers have created work at once inspired and confined by intense, real-life family experiences But while Louis’ writing extends into broader areas of the political, Toews’ has been focused more intensely on the personal: on grief, humour, sex, and mental health Toews grew up in a remote Canadian Mennonite (an Amish-like Christian religion) community in a loving family of four When she was thirty-four her father killed himself Twelve years later, her elder sister did the same Her 2001 work Swing Low is a memoir of her father, told in Toews’ imagined version of his voice Her later novel, All My Puny Sorrows, published in 2014, also concerns a suicide in the family, this time that of her sister   One might expect these earlier novels to be darker and more solemn than they are; in fact, Toews’ writing on death and suicide is often funny, tender, hopeful – even light-hearted In Swing Low, the narrator recollects his life from a hospital bedroom, having suffered a depressive episode Though in many ways a convincing portrayal, his voice is instilled with nostalgia, humour and hope, at odds with a man on the brink of suicide: in her father’s voice, Toews’ own ineluctable lightness strains out From the hospital bed, he declares, ‘I will write my way out of this mess!’ But of course, he