‘All My Puny Sorrows’ Review: Two Sisters Debate the Merits of Living in a Sincere But Stilted Grief Drama

Miriam Toews’ 2014 novel “All My Puny Sorrows” thrives on the kind of fraught tonal whiplash that comes with the most intimate of relationships to one’s subject. Inspired by the suicide of the author’s sister, the book is a veiled grief memoir that veers wildly between plangent, poetic despair, plainspoken journaling and blunt, cutting humor — a spectrum mirroring the variable stages of grief itself. We can risk brutality and bad taste in the name of honesty when telling our own stories; Michael McGowan’s adaptation of “All My Puny Sorrows,” on the other hand, approaches its with a respectful timidity… Read Full Article