Miriam Toews on her bestseller Women Talking becoming an Oscar contender

As the film Women Talking begins, a title card appears. “What follows,” it reads, “is an act of female imagination.” Adapted from Miriam Toews’s 2018 novel by Canadian director Sarah Polley, it is certainly the product of female invention. But although what follows is imagined, the root is not.

Between 2005 and 2009, in a Mennonite colony in Bolivia, eight men sexually assaulted and raped more than 150 women and girls, spraying animal anaesthetic into houses to render them unconscious. Elders of the Anabaptist Christian church dismissed the attacks as “wild female imagination”: victims were ignored or told they had been punished by the devil. The truth was only discovered when two men were caught breaking into a house.

Novelist Miriam Toews, 58, grew up in a Mennonite congregation in Canada and first heard about the attacks on the “Mennonite grapevine” before it reached the news. “When I started hearing about what was going on,” she tells me over Zoom from her home in Toronto, “and with the experiences that I and my sister and my mother and my grandmother and just about every Mennonite woman I know have had with sexual violence . . . I had questions in terms of, ‘Why do we write what we write?’ I had questions.”

Those question stewed for years and became her eighth book — and an international bestseller. Polley’s film adaptation was nominated last week for two Oscars: Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay.

The story focuses on the afterwards. A group of women gather in a hayloft. They refine their arguments, circle around what justice means and what their faith allows. In two days, the men will return from the city. The women must reach a decision: either they will leave, stay and fight, or do nothing.

With stirring performances from a cast including Claire Foy, Rooney Mara and Frances McDormand (who also produces), it’s hard to imagine the film being anything other than a success. But it must have felt daunting for Toews. Many Mennonites in the Bolivian colony originally came from her home town; the surnames she gave her characters are loaned from her family.

“I think at the beginning it’s important to get a little Zen about it,” she says with a grin. “You know: detach, relinquish control and just sit back.”

During development, Toews read drafts of Polley’s scripts, watched casting auditions and visited sets. “A hundred years ago or more,” she says, “I had thought that I would also like to make movies.” But watching the director at work gave her an extra appreciation. “My writer’s brain just doesn’t move into those structures.”

I ask whether there were aspects of the novel she feared would be hard to translate to screen. “I did think: how is she going to — or will she — do it? . . . Then, when I saw the script and the movie itself, I realised that there were sections of the book that just weren’t a part of the film . . . and absolutely, necessarily they weren’t.”

Women Talking was shot on 70mm film in an extra-wide aspect ratio originally developed for macho 1950s Westerns. Its unexpected use here lends the movie a subversively epic quality. The title is, after all, tongue-in-cheek. The palette is dark, but scenes with children and landscapes are subtly brighter. Modern details intrude like anachronisms, a census van driving by the colony with blaring speakers.

“Even if I try and put a lid on it . . . it just has such a hold on me,” Toews says of her pull towards the Mennonites in her writing. Her novel about Mennonite sisters, All My Puny Sorrows, was made into a film in 2021. But Women Talking depicts the religion in a way that is more immersive and extreme. Does she worry about the reaction?

“There are people who hate me and who wish I were dead . . . that has been the case from the minute that I was born . . . but when I get that support or encouragement from the Mennonites . . .” she trails off. “Even some very conservative older Mennonite men writing to say, ‘We appreciate what you’re doing.’ That means the world to me.”

Her eyes get shinier as she speaks. “With the making of the movie,” she says, “they had an on-set therapist. When I read that, I thought, ‘Oh yeah, I would have enjoyed that when I was writing the book.’” She laughs. “And if that’s the experience for us, removed from the community, making our art, imagine the lives of the women . . .”

It is clear how intense the project has been for her. Was it important to have a female team collaborating on the project? “It does make a difference,” she says. “And part of [Sarah Polley’s] film-making rule book or ethos is that she believes in a collaborative effort.”

There’s an understanding, because we have all experienced misogyny . . . and it’s in our bones, it’s in our blood

“I guess that’s something that I’ve experienced my entire life, growing up the way that I grew up. We were often sort of separate from the men. And there seemed to be a way of talking,” she laughs, murmuring “women talking” under her breath. “Obviously there was conflict and arguing and no agreement, no consensus. But, on the other hand, I think there is a difference.”

As the writing addresses female experience, I suggest, it must be reassuring to relinquish your material knowing that there are things you can take as a given, that you don’t need to explain. “That’s so true,” she says, emphatic yet quiet. “There’s a shorthand.”

“And if it’s not necessarily a solidarity, it is definitely an understanding . . . ” She stops, her eyes drawn to a distraction beyond the wall of the laptop. Her mother is waving from the house opposite — perfect timing, given our discussion of female community. “There’s an understanding, because we have all experienced misogyny . . . and it’s in our bones, it’s in our blood and there is something about that. When we get together as women, it’s a relief.”

Despite the gravity of the story, humour is laced into Women Talking. One woman suggests: “Why don’t we ask the men to leave?” A grandmother in the colony responds: “Ask all the men to leave? When before we have asked not even for the salt to pass?” Fury tremors in her voice; the question hangs in the air. And then all the women burst into laughter, set off by the absurdity. In another scene, while two women argue, a teenage girl mimes hanging herself out of boredom. Did Toews ask Polley to preserve the levity?

“Absolutely. That was definitely up there and she did it so well.” But it was also about protecting the characters from laughter. “It’s so easy to laugh at Mennonites . . . I grew up always with that, feeling self-conscious,” she says.

For the women of Women Talking, their faith is a support. So too is the promise of laughter and the promise of a new life. The story is upsetting to watch and difficult to shrug off afterwards, but what stayed with me too was the defiance of the performances, the brighter edges of the landscape. There’s hope in it. Does Toews agree?

“That has to exist,” she says firmly. “I think in their narrative, in our art, in our thinking and our imaginations, we have to hope for change.”

‘Women Talking’ is in US cinemas now and UK cinemas from February 10