Swing Low

May 23, 2011
Imagining her troubled father telling his life story, Canadian novelist Toews (The Flying Troutmans) offers a touching memoir. When her father was 17 years old, he was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Going against the accepted 1950s medical advice, he dived into life, determined to become a "better human being." He married, raised a family, and taught school for 40 years. Yet when he committed suicide, he felt his life had amounted to little. Toews toggles between her father's memories of a happy life and his current circumstances as a patient in the local hospital, following a breakdown near the end of his life. "How to explain the process of putting the pieces of my brain together: as though I'm attempting to walk down a street and various limbs, arms and legs, continue to drop off my body. I'm getting nowhere." Teaching provided the scaffolding of normalcy for Toews's father, allowing him to function successfully in public, though later he retreated into silence while with his family. Raised within the strict, conservative Mennonite religion, Toews's father never admitted to his illness, seeing it as a flaw festering within his weak character. In this sympathetic telling, Toews shows how the opposite was true.

October 8, 2001
Toews's father, Mel, lived the simple life of a faithful Mennonite community member in mid-20th-century Canada, as a schoolteacher, father and devout churchgoer. In 1952, only a few knew he had been diagnosed with manic depression at age 17, and his struggle to conceal this from the world and maintain a "normal" life met with varying degrees of success until retirement shook his self-image and he began to slide into his most serious depression. This ordinary but poignant biography, written by his daughter (A Boy of Good Breeding), reconstructs Mel's story in his own voice, which, once established, provides a deeply sympathetic imagining of a manic depressive's interior world. From an early age, Toews's father believed that "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." In Toews's version, Mel eventually turns to writing to make sense of his condition, to review his life in the hope of seeing it more clearly.What engages us is a strong and realistic sense of a man who chose to use the little energy he had to construct a safe world for his family, but one in which he felt he could never fully participate. For Toews, by "dragging some of the awful details into the light of day," she recognized that her father "found a way to alleviate his pain, and so have I."