![]() ![]() A few months after Momo's death, she explains, Mooshie went to Albania to film a movie. Swiv begins to have a panic attack, and Elvira tells her a story to distract her. They are seated on the tarmac for some time because the plane is having “mechanical problems” (136). In Part 2, Swiv and Elvira go to the airport. On the bus to Scarborough, Mooshie embarrasses Swiv by yelling at some men who will not give up their seats. When Mooshie comes home that night, she agrees to let Elvira go, but only if Swiv accompanies her. She asks Swiv to book her an airline ticket for the trip. The next day, she asks Elvira, “What happens to a kid if everyone in her family is insane?” (95).Įlvira tells Swiv that she needs to go to Scarborough to visit her hairdresser because she is planning to take a trip to Fresno, California to visit her nephews. The letter distresses Swiv, so she hides it in the back of her closet. Mooshie's letter contains expressions of grief about the death of her sister, Momo, anger toward men, and an account of a dream Mooshie had about being in a mental hospital. Later, she asks Mooshie to write to Gord as well. In the letter, Elvira tells Gord, “You're a small thing and you must learn to fight” (79). Swiv asks Elvira to write a letter to Gord. The family has been writing letters to one another at the behest of a family therapist. She uses Swiv and Elvira's favorite sports team, the Toronto Raptors, as an example of teamwork. ![]() We need others to fight alongside us” (71). ![]() The next day, Swiv and Mooshie go for a walk together, and Mooshie tells Swiv, “We need teams. Swiv knows that Mooshie is “afraid of losing her mind and killing herself” (60), but Elvira tells her this is not going to happen. As Elvira convalesces, Swiv asks her why Mooshie is “so weird,” to which Elvira responds, “ is a fighter on every front” (59). Elvira takes this in stride, laughing as Swiv helps her up. One morning, Swiv wakes to find that Elvira has fallen in the kitchen. after her mother died, then returned to her hometown and met and married Swiv's grandfather. As a teenager, she attended Bible school in the U.S. She was the youngest of 14 children, and at age eight, she was responsible for shoveling coal into the home's heater. Swiv explains that Elvira grew up in a small community of Russian immigrant Mennonites, ruled over by the church leader, a tyrannical man named Willit Braun. Swiv accompanies Elvira to a restaurant where she is meeting a friend and listens to the two women talking about “assisted dying” (35). Mooshie, meanwhile, is frequently angry, presumably because she is a pregnant single mother trying to make ends meet as an actress. She says that she survived the grief by asking herself, “Who can I help” (15). She lost both her husband and daughter, Swiv's Aunt Momo, to suicide. She recently gave her sweatpants to a man experiencing homelessness. Elvira is eccentric herself, but also kind and generous. Swiv has been expelled from school for fighting, and Elvira is homeschooling her, teaching eccentric lessons like “How to Dig a Winter Grave” (9). In Part One, she is living in Toronto with her grandmother, Elvira, and her mother, Mooshie, who is pregnant with a baby they call Gord. The novel is narrated by eight-year-old Swiv, as a letter to her absent father. The following version of this book was used to create this study guide: Toews, Miriam. ![]()
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