Excerpt from A Truce That Is Not Peace by Miriam Toews, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

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 kept the letter in his basement for ten years. Then he met another woman and decided to move. He needed to clean out the basement and sell his house. One morning, he gave my sister's "paperwork," which included my father's "paperwork," to my mother.

That afternoon my mother read the letter written thirty-five years before by the biological father of my son to my father, and instantly tore it up. "There was no reason for that letter to exist," she said. "There was nothing edifying about it."

First order of the day. Clean up the blood.

Kept ten years by my father, kept ten years by my sister, kept ten years by my sister's partner. Destroyed in one second by my mother, its shreds tossed into the garbage can under the sink. We laughed.

Numbers and letters.

* * *

Many years ago, I stood next to the Assiniboine River and contemplated suicide, but only got as far as throwing my cellphone into the water before being talked away from the shore. Shortly after, I was visiting my psychiatrist at the Victoria Hospital in Winnipeg. I was terrified and gaunt and silent. I smoked cigarette after cigarette. I imagined every sort of bug trapped in the torn lining of my winter jacket. I was convinced that I had destroyed the people I loved most in the world.

An orderly walked past the room where my psychiatrist and I were sitting, and then walked past again. This time he stopped and put his head in the doorway. He asked me if I was who I am. No, I said. I'm Lisa Cook.

* * *

My father's last meal was an uneaten ham sandwich, and his last joke was directed at me: Did you have much trouble deciding what to wear?

I had worn the same torn jeans and green hoodie every day for the two weeks leading up to his death. Earlier, my father and I had eaten breakfast in a truck stop at Deacon's Corner, on the outskirts of Winnipeg. We were on our way into the city to meet with his doctor, and then to gather with the rest of the family for dinner at Tubby's where my father

ordered a ham sandwich as a favour to my mother, and talked about colours with my daughter, and watched long and hard as my son ambled off home, getting smaller and smaller until he was a tiny dot and then gone.

If I combine the name of my father's favourite hymn with the name of my sister's favourite book at age eighteen, the title would be "Oh for a Thousand Tongues to Sing the Lives of Girls and Women."

If I then added another favourite book of my sister's and a favourite song of my mom's, the title would be "Oh for a Thousand Tongues to Sing the Lives of Girls and Women, Sons and Lovers in a Dangerous Time."

* * *

In Winnipeg, when I was pregnant with my son, I lived in an old apartment block by the Assiniboine River (the same river that years later would consume my cellphone) next to a tennis court and a bridge. An old woman lived down the hall from us. There were tiny little doors on our bigger doors. These tiny doors were the size and shape of a Penguin Classic and had little latches at eye level. When there was a knock on our door, we opened our tiny door first to see who it was and whether we wanted to open the bigger door to let them in. Many times each day, and sometimes during the night, the old woman would bang on my door, anguished, calling out for her son: Peter, Peter! She spoke only Hungarian. She was in the very late stages of dementia. Her words sounded like, Pater, Pater!

Excerpted from A Truce That Is Not Peace by Miriam Toews. Copyright © 2025 by Miriam Toews. Excerpted by permission of Bloomsbury Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.