A Truce That Is Not Peace

“Why do you write?” the organizer of a literary event in Mexico City asks Miriam Toews. Each attempted answer from Toews—all of them unsatisfactory to the organizer—surfaces new layers of grief, guilt, and futility connected to her sister’s suicide. She has been keeping up, she realizes, a decades-old internal correspondence, filling a silence she barely understands. And we, her readers, come to see that the question is as impossible to answer as deciding whether to live life as a comedy or a tragedy.

Marking the first time Toews has written her own life in nonfiction, A Truce That Is Not Peace explores the uneasy pact every creative person makes with memory. Wildly inventive yet masterfully controlled; slyly casual yet momentous; wrenching and joyful; hilarious and humane—this is Miriam Toews at her dazzling best, remaking her world and inventing an astonishing new literary form to contain it.