Subverting resilience in the psychiatric ward: Finding the good death in Miriam Toews’s All My Puny Sorrows
Subverting resilience in the psychiatric ward: Finding the good death in Miriam Toews’s All My Puny Sorrows

Summary/Abstract: This article posits that Miriam Toews’s All My Puny Sorrows (2014) introduces a critique of howneoliberal visions of resilience have permeated medical discourses on mental health, resultingin a perceived moral imperative over the patient to improve, which the author counters witha model of resilience firmly rooted in interdependence and the social potential of vulnerability.Toews’s focus on the narrator Yolandi’s struggle with the aftermath of her sister’s suicide alsotroubles the concept of resilience by introducing the idea of assisted suicide as a possible itera-tion of a “good death”, completely circumventing any possibility of recovery or adaptation. Whatholds the key for Yolandi’s recovery and happiness, Toews seems to imply, is accepting her sister’srejection of resilience as a viable option.

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