San Francisco, California
October 10, 2000

Dear Readers,

Given that yesterday was Thanksgiving in Canada, Columbus Day in the United States, and Yom Kippur everywhere, we’ve decided to leave Miriam Toews’s letter up until Tuesday night, at which moment Jessica Willis’s letter will arise in its place.

As I wrote yesterday, Miriam Toews’s writing tends to speak for itself, so I don’t feel like I need to add too much. But there are a few notes I’d like to offer, as context to this letter and this week:

1. Miriam’s letter is in some ways the postscript, or the sequel, or the appendix, to her book Swing Low: A Life, which is a memoir about her father and his life in Mennonite Manitoba, and his mental illness, and his suicide. There are many remarkable things about Miriam’s book, but perhaps the most remarkable is that it is not her memoir; it is her father’s: the book is in his voice, not hers.

2. Today’s letter, though, is in her voice.

3. If you live in Canada, you’re probably familiar with Miriam’s book; it was widely reviewed and praised when it was published in April, and it is available in your local bookstore. If you don’t live in Canada, though, it’s not available in your local bookstore; it’s not even available on Amazon. This is one of those things that can make some people – me, for instance – frustrated about Canadian book publishing. How is it possible that one of the, let’s say, five best books published this year in North America isn’t available in the United States? And yet, it is not. So if you are an American reader, please buy Miriam’s book from Indigo, or Chapters, or McNally Robinson. It costs a little extra to ship from Canada, but remember: those are Canadian dollars they’re charging. And if you are an American publisher: listen, buy the American rights to this book, publish it here, and sit back and let the cash roll in. Remember: you get to charge American dollars.

4. When I think about Swing Low, I often think about it in the context of Dave Eggers’s book A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius: both Dave and Miriam set out to write about an impossible tragedy – the sudden death of a parent – and each of them took a turn along the way that transformed their book from a simple memoir into something bigger and more profound. Their solutions were quite different, and the two books read quite differently – but each book resonated with me because the subtext seemed to be the task itself, of writing honestly and intelligently about such an emotional subject: a question that is also, of course, at the heart of the project of Open Letters.

5. If Miriam’s writing seems a little familiar, it might be because she is, as she puts it, “the writer formerly known as X.” If you are new to Open Letters, you can read X.’s series of five open letters, about her son and his father, by going to the archive page and paging down: she’s the only X. The question of why Miriam was once X. and is now Miriam is long and complicated, but it connects, I think, to #4, above: when you’re doing the kind of death-defying writing that Miriam has been doing in Open Letters and elsewhere, questions like authorship and responsibility and privacy and fairness lurk around every corner; and the answers to those questions sometimes change.

6. So there won’t be any more X. letters. But there will, I hope, be more Miriam letters.

7. Miriam has written these books, too.

8. Miriam’s letter is the first in a series of three letters that we will be publishing in Open Letters this week. One of our editors suggested that we call this week “In The System,” and that title fits: all three letters are by and about women at various moments of intersection with the mental-health system. Tomorrow: Jessica Willis, on being section-35ed.

Yours truly,

Paul Tough