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Book Reviewed by:Internationally bestselling author Miriam Toews' memoir of the will to write-a work of disobedient memory, humor, and exquisite craft set against a content-hungry, prose-stuffed society.
"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 a writer 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.
Excerpt
A Truce That Is Not Peace
Thirty-eight years ago, the biological father of my son wrote a letter to my father. He wanted my father to know that he had asked me to marry him many times but that I'd refused every time. He had done his best to do the right thing. Now, he had to leave. He had to disappear into the Pacific Rim. He'd tried everything to get me to listen to reason but it hadn't worked. He had to go.
My father kept the letter, opened or unopened, read or unread—we don't know—for ten years, without mentioning it to anyone. Then, my father killed himself. My sister and I sat on either side of my mother on the couch in my living room and told her, He's gone.
My sister stored all my father's "paperwork" in her basement. She kept that letter, written to my father by my son's biological father, for ten years. We don't know if she read it or not. Then, my sister killed herself. I told my mother over the phone from Toronto, She's gone.
My sister's partner ...
2025 National Book Critics Circle Award Finalists
...by Geraldine Brooks (Viking) Mother Mary Comes to Me by Arundhati Roy (Scribner) Paper Girl by Beth Macy (Penguin) Shattered by Hanif Kureishi (Ecco) A Truce That Is Not Peace by Miriam Toews (Bloomsbury) Biography : Love, Queenie: Merle Oberon, Hollywood's First South Asian Star by Mayukh Sen (W.W Norton) A Perfect Turmoil: Walter E. Fern...
-kim.kovacs
Miriam Toews, author of seven novels including the international bestsellers Women Talking and All My Puny Sorrows, has written directly about her life for the first time in her memoir A Truce That Is Not Peace. The book is Toews' attempt to answer the question, "Why Do I Write?" As a conceit, she invents a fictional event in Mexico City, where writers from around the world are asked to present stories or essays on a committee-chosen topic: why they write. Each section begins with Toews' progress in providing a response. Ultimately, she explains how her craft is intertwined with her attempts to understand her father and sister—their silences, and their deaths, both by suicide. The book is a tragic, darkly humorous, and contemplative exploration of grief, artistic ambition, what silence conveys, and how writing sustains life. It aims to answer unanswerable questions about grief, silence, and writing as a form of survival, ideal for readers who enjoy literary memoirs that eschew a linear narrative in favor of philosophical exploration...continued
Full Review
(799 words)
(Reviewed by Letitia Asare).
Hannah Pittard, author of We Are Too Many
Piercing and distilled, a masterpiece in vulnerability and performance. A Truce That Is Not Peace is a stunner. Laura van den Berg, author of State of Paradise and The Third Hotel
Why do I write? Miriam Toews's response to this impossible-to-answer prompt gives way to a haunting, tragi-comic, and incredibly moving inquiry into the landscapes and the people that define us; the parts of life that make no sense; and the things that, against all odds, keep us alive. A Truce That Is not Peace is essential reading, a smart and wise companion for turbulent times.
Miriam Toews' memoir A Truce That Is Not Peace explores the grief behind the loss of a loved one to suicide, as the author tries to understand the deaths of her father and sister, about a decade apart from one another, through the act of writing. There have been many memoirs and other works of nonfiction centered around navigating grief, and plenty that specifically focus on the loss of a loved one to suicide, including the following.
Things in Nature Merely Grow (2025) by Yiyun Li
Li writes of her son James, who died by suicide in 2024, six years after her eldest son Vincent did the same. The memoir is not solely focused on grief, but on the facts of her sons' deaths, and more importantly, who they were in life, as well as how Li ...
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