Morality in the context of mortality is a big question. Yes, it’s angst-y but existence is a super-weird thing to contemplate. I think both the novel and the movie are uplifting. I don’t think it’s an unhappy ending either. I had read and loved the novel and hadn’t thought it was particularly adaptable. Did that make it more attractive as a project?ĪP: What was attractive about the project was the script Mike wrote adapting the novel. It’s a sad story absent a fairy-tale ending. KH: Alison, this wasn’t an obvious book to adapt.

Plus, you can’t make a movie like this unless you’re willing to explore existential themes, which Alison and I did while rehearsing. I wanted Elf to be as realized and three-dimensional as she was in the novel. We often think of mental health in a narrow way. I advocated for the character to be a woman who was depressed and suicidal, yes, but who was also many other things. When I met with Miriam to discuss her family and her relationship with her sister specifically during the times she was institutionalized, one thing that kept popping up was how funny and ironic and sardonic and clever and lucid she was.

SG: Miriam does an amazing job in the novel of exploring these two women and Elf’s state of being. The Canadian-made adaptation of All My Puny Sorrows by 56-year-old writer-director Michael McGowan - which premiered last year at the Toronto International Film Festival, and opens in Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal on April 15 (and expanding throughout spring) - gets it mostly right, thanks to an excellent cast offering committed performances. But it made cinematically nailing the book’s tone a feat all its own.

That range distinguishes Toews, 57, as a towering talent. Divorce, death, religious intolerance, community ostracism and filial love are among the book’s prevailing themes but, despite that, All My Puny Sorrows is often funny.

Adapting a celebrated and much-loved novel for the screen is a fraught process at the best of times and doubly so with Canadian author Miriam Toews’ widely fêted and award-winning 2014 novel, All My Puny Sorrows.įor her deeply intimate story about two sisters raised in a Mennonite community in Manitoba, Toews drew on her own family history - namely her older sister Marjorie’s suicide in 2010.

All my puny sorrows by miriam toews