"Fight Night" by Miriam Toews

An audio book.

Narrator Swiv (female) lives with a pregnant mother who goes to acting rehearsals, and an ailing grandma. They live in Canada? Swiv's been expelled from school. Her father is away. They watch "Call the midwife". Mother and grandma are disinhibited about sex. When they can't tell from the ultrasound scan the baby's gender (the sex organs obscured), Swiv thinks the baby's better off without sex organs. She thinks that adults are busy so they have to look happy and sad at the same time. Swiv wants everyone to be normal. Mother tells Swiv that she should have more friends, or at least one friend. Swiv thinks grandma isn't paying attention because she's too preoccupied with going insane. Suicide and madness are in the family tree.

While Swiv and grandma are on a plane waiting to take off for San Francisco, grandma explains with perfect clarity that Swiv's mother had gone to Albania for 4 months to do a film. Her passport had been taken, she stayed with some of the cast in a lighthouse, the drinking water made her ill, she did her own stunts, and had an affair. The baby she's expecting might be her lover's, which is why Swiv's father left and why her mother's feeling so guilty. In California they visit nephews. We learn that Swiv is about 100 months old (i.e. not yet 9).

Grandma breaks her arm dancing at an old people's home. The return to Canada, go a hospital where grandma goes into acute care. When Swiv's mother visits she goes into labour. Swiv takes the baby to Grandma.

It's full of jokes and funny anecdotes, aided by the cranky old grandma who gets into conversation with anyone. But the California part of the book didn't interest me.

Other reviews

• Stephanie Merritt ( the motifs that are reworked through all her books are largely autobiographical. She draws on her cultural background – growing up in a strict Mennonite community in rural Canada – as well as her family history: both her father and her sister killed themselves after long battles with mental illness ... Elvira shares a name and part of her biography with the author’s own mother; in the novel, she too has lost a husband and a daughter to suicide and escaped a repressive small-town religious community with an authoritarian leader. ... Her narrative takes the form of an extended letter to her unnamed father, who has recently left with no indication of any intention to return. As a framing device it’s not entirely convincing; for long swaths of the story the form appears to be forgotten, so that when the second person suddenly intrudes the effect can be jarring. ... Some of Swiv’s precocity can be explained by the weight of responsibility she carries, though at times she displays a knowingness that doesn’t quite ring true in a nine-year-old and occasionally tips into archness ... In less skilled hands, the emotional double whammy of the novel’s ending could easily come across as trite.)
• Dina Nayeri