Swing Low: A Life [Hardcover]

Miriam Toews (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 5, 2001

One morning Mel Toews put on his coat and hat and walked out of town, prepared to die. A loving husband and father, faithful member of the Mennonite church, and immensely popular schoolteacher, he was a pillar of his close-knit community. Yet after a lifetime of struggle, he could no longer face the darkness of manic depression. With razor-sharp precision, Swing Low tells his story in his own voice, taking us deep inside the experience of despair. But it is also a funny, winsome evocation of country life: growing up on farm, courting a wife, becoming a teacher, and rearing a happy, strong family in the midst of private torment. A humane, inspiring story of a remarkable man, father, and teacher.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

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."

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Manic depression, or bipolar disorder, is commonly characterized by hyperactive highs and extreme lows, the latter sometimes leading to suicide. One day Canadian Melvin Toews got out of bed, dressed, and headed out the door. He sat or knelt at a train track and waited for the train, which eventually came. A lifetime of manic depression with no real treatment may have led him to that sad end. How he may have come to that point was the question that prompted his daughter to write her father's "memoir." Using in part her father's writings, Miriam Toews chronicles her father's life effectively "in his own words." His strict Mennonite community and upbringing may have led to a life in which he had to endure his illness without treatment, and for a time he was successful. Both his work as an elementary-school teacher and his dedication to building the perfect home masked his problem for a while. When he was finally hospitalized, it probably was too late to help him cope with his illness. Marlene Chamberlain
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 208 pages
• Publisher: Arcade Publishing (December 5, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1559705876
• ISBN-13: 978-1559705875
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.8 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,710,249 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars Sweet Chariot, November 2, 2011

By 

Andre Gerard (Vancouver, B.C.) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Swing Low: A Life (Hardcover)

While many father memoirs are remarkable for their inventive excellence, few are as original and as powerful as Swing Low. In Swing Low: A Life, Miriam Toews imagines herself into her father's head, and brings him back to life as a narrative "I." Her imaginative accomplishment is all the more remarkable in that her father suffered from bipolar disease throughout his life, and eventually his depression became so deep and his mind so confused that that he committed suicide by stepping in front of a train. Such a story would be horrific and depressing, if it weren't for the calmness of the narrative voice. Toews' father was a Mennonite living and teaching in a small Manitoba town, and in her rendering of her father's interior life Toews also explores the tensions between self and community and teases out "the complicated kindness" which makes those tensions almost bearable. Despite the father's mental illness and suicide, Swing Low is a wonderfully sane and life affirming book.

Andre Gerard
Editor of Fathers: A Literary Anthology

5.0 out of 5 stars Review of Swing Low, October 2, 2011

By 

Lydia "The Lost Entwife" (Illinois) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Swing Low: A Life (Paperback)

Let me just say ... I did not enjoy Irma Voth - the fiction novel that Miriam Toews wrote and I reviewed just a few weeks ago. So it was with some trepidation that I picked Swing Low up off my shelf.

I was blown away.

Seriously, this book was nothing at all like Irma Voth. It was clear, concise, and a beautiful tribute to her father. Miriam's voice, as she speaks from her father's point of view, is crystal clear, heart-breaking and filled with love. I never once got the sense that he was, in any way shape or form, a bad man. I understood that he was sick, broken in a way, I understood that he loved his family - his wife and his children, and I wept when we came to the point of his last decision.

All through the book what spoke loudest to me was his daughters forgiveness. Miriam shows with complete clarity that, while she loved her father dearly, she cannot hate him for what he did. How powerful is that forgiveness? It spoke to my heart, it made me weep, it made me appreciate my own parents more and think about just how serious, how dreadful and how dangerous mental disorders can be.

Take the time to hug your family. Tell them you love them. Read this book if you need a good kick in the pants to remind you of how special they are.

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An amazing book, May 8, 2010

By 

A Customer - See all my reviews

This review is from: Swing Low: A Life (Kindle Edition)

This book must have been incredibly hard to write but we should thank Miriam Toews for seeing it through. This is a very insightful picture of one man's struggle and its ripple effect. She captured a perspective that many of us are lucky enough not to feel but that we need to understand in order to be supportive to others.