The book opens with three curious black-and-white images that look like miniature woodcuts: The first features puffy clouds hanging over a field, the second a man and woman thrusting knives at each other, and the third a horse gazing back over its shoulder. Willow Dawson’s secret-ballot illustration from Miriam Toews’s Women Talking, 2018. But the book is less an indignant manifesto about sexual trauma, or a speculative celebration of female empowerment, than it is a confession of violence as something stitched into the fabric of every community, and an exploration of what it means to claim communal thought-even disagreement itself-as an inalienable human right. After years of being told that they were suffering from hysterical delusions, or else being punished by demons for their sins of impurity, the women “came to understand that they were collectively dreaming one dream, and that it wasn’t a dream at all.” Women Talking is based on actual rapes that occurred on a Mennonite settlement in Bolivia between 20. Specifically, they are talking about the men who have repeatedly drugged and raped them in their remote Mennonite colony, knocking them out with an animal tranquilizer in the middle of the night before violating them in their own bedrooms. In Miriam Toews’s new novel, Women Talking, the women are talking about men. What we talk about when we talk about women talking: Gossip.
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