This may be fiction, but that doesn’t mean it’s not based in fact. Knowing that the novelist didn’t have to conjure an entire world but merely color in an existing one lends it an unnerving quality. But where the what-ifs that populate those books’ imagined landscapes-What if fertility were your only currency? What if you could not leave your island? What if you were allowed only 100 words per day?-are speculative, Women Talking is built on actual events. Mining sexual violence, patriarchy, religion, and the meaning of forgiveness and pacifism, the book is feminist dystopian fiction in the tradition of The Handmaid’s Tale, Vox, and The Water Cure. Women Talking is a brutal phantasmagoria in which horses have women’s names and women are treated like horses.
When Ruth and Cheryl are attacked by a neighbor’s dogs, their owner reports, their “instinct is to bolt.” The horses do not “organize meetings to determine their next course of action,” she says pointedly to women who have organized meetings to determine their next course of action.
Early in Miriam Toews’s Women Talking, a woman speaks about her horses, which are named Ruth and Cheryl.
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