Canadian author Miriam Toews (Women Talking, All My Puny Sorrows) lost both her father and her sister Marjorie to suicide. She was not sure the loss was something she could ever write about.

“I had no words,” she told Kristen Martin. But then after a couple of years, Toews had a realization:

No, I’m a writer. This is what I do, take stuff and work it into something that makes sense to me…