‘All that happens, one must try to understand’

Abstract

Speaking at Trent University on the subject of ‘Books that Mattered to Me’, Margaret Laurence gave special praise to a novella and a writer few in that Canadian audience of 1980 recognised. ‘Tillie Olsen,’ she reported,

is an American writer with whom I feel a deep sense of empathy, tribal kinship, sisterhood. Her book, Tell Me a Riddle, consists of a novella and three short stories. She has written relatively little because of her personal circumstances. She married young, had four children and for many years had to work at a job outside her home. Her book, Silences, explores the circumstances that have prevented some writers, both female and male, from fulfilling their life’s work. The novella, Tell Me a Riddle, seems to me to be as close to perfection as any contemporary prose I have read. In just fifty printed pages — fifty! — Olsen communicates the story of a long marriage, an entire family, ancestral roots reaching back into a long ago past in other countries, the ways in which humans suffer and hurt one another and yet support and love one another. In my view, it is a small masterpiece.¹