A TRUCE THAT IS NOT PEACE, by Miriam Toews
In 1982, at 24, Miriam Toews’s older sister, Marjorie, left her university, moved back to their parents’ home in Manitoba and “stopped making sounds altogether.” This was not her first period of silence; over the course of Toews’s life both her sister and father went through long stretches of not speaking, to anyone at all, for up to a year at a time. They both eventually died by suicide, 10 years apart.
But during those stretches, Toews recalls in her discursive, revelatory new memoir, “A Truce That Is Not Peace,” her father and sister did not stop communicating; rather they “wrote and wrote and wrote.” While secluded in her childhood bedroom, Marj “begged me to write her letters” from a bike trip around Europe that the teenage Toews was about to take.
“In that asking was an offering,” the author says. “She taught me how to stay alive.”
The immediate impetus for the book is an invitation Toews receives in April 2023 to participate in a literary event in Mexico City, whose subject is: “Why do I write?” The question beleaguers her greatly: Is writing a version of silence, an inherently soundless, solitary act, a “non-talking”; or is writing the opposite of silence, even its antidote? She in turn beleaguers the event’s director. “Why do I write? Or … Why write?” she emails back. “Why do I write, he said.”
Her submissions are summarily rejected. “No, no,” the director chastises: “The question is not, Why am I a writer, but: Why do I write.” (Toews: “Douchebag question either way.”) Soon she is removed from the program, and the germ of this memoir is born.
Like much of Toews’s fiction (“Women Talking,” “All My Puny Sorrows,” “A Complicated Kindness,” “Fight Night”), which often revolves around lineages of Mennonite women suffering sexual violence and mental illness, this memoir — her second, after “Swing Low” (2001), about her father’s manic depression — is as fluent in the comic register as it is in the tragic.
The author doesn’t just toe the line between the two extremes; she proves there isn’t one. When Marj has her first period, she sends 6-year-old Toews to the store for pads. “I was soaked in sweat, pedalling as fast as I could, balancing a giant box of belted Kotex pads on my bike’s handlebars, whispering to myself the words, the battle cry, It’s Scooby-Doo or die!” The memory takes on a particular poignancy half a century later: “I’ve never felt so alive, so engaged and determined, so essential, as I did that day, coming to the rescue of my bleeding, dying, enraged (now that she was a woman) sister.”
Decades later, when her 4-year-old grandson asks her at bedtime how old she is, he follows the answer with:
And then you’ll be 70. And then you’ll be 80. And then you’ll be 90. And then you’ll be 100. And then you’ll be murdered.
What! I said.
I mean and then you’ll be dead, he said.
OK, I answered.
And then I’ll wrap you in toilet paper, he said.
Thank you, sweetheartchen.
This is a grief memoir in the vein of Joan Didion’s “Blue Nights,” or Alexandra Fuller’s “Fi”: written not from the trenches of fresh loss but from the steadier perch of a generation-long hindsight (the unpeaceful truce of the book’s title, taken from an essay by the poet Christian Wiman). The book is less a linear narrative than a neat pile of shattered glass, one shard picked up at a time, in no discernible order.
Among these fragments are letters Toews exchanged with her sister and mother over decades; an 11-page riff on the psychiatric evaluation she underwent after nearly drowning herself years ago; and the circling, quotidian thoughts of the living — the ailing skunk trapped in her window well, the wind museum she wants to create, the Mexico City literary event. She needs to confront her ex-husband about paying back her book royalties. Her father’s last meal was a ham sandwich. A line in Marj’s journal: “I Kant! I Kant! C’mus! C’mus!”
According to the Mexico City program director, her first response does not answer the question “Why do I write?”: “My juvenile letters to my sister describing a European cycling adventure are not appropriate within that context.” Their loss. This epistolary account of her travels as an 18-year-old across the hostels and cemeteries and bars and hilly farmlands of Ireland, England and France, with a poser, wannabe-revolutionary boyfriend she can’t for the life of her stop fighting with, is easily the funniest and most affecting section in the book.
A pipe bomb kills two Belfast teenagers while they’re in Northern Ireland, so “we’ve made the switch from armed resistance to art. (This also means we can sleep in later in the mornings.)” After having sex in what her boyfriend deems the “bucolic setting” of a stone wall in an Irish field, she writes, “I still have tiny pieces of rock ground bucolically into my back and ass.” Broke and starving in France, Toews blithely reports: “Our bikes were stolen in Rouen, where Joan of Arc was burned at the stake — so relatively speaking, we can’t complain.”
Marj’s side of the conversation is missing, but the specter of her voice haunts every page. “I’m trying to write stuff down about our life, as per your instructions,” one letter reads, and she summons their shared memories of a family friend’s undescended testicles; of their father finding dead mouse fetuses behind the piano and the sisters “laughing so hard, from the shock and horror” of it; of their father slunk over his Cheerios at the kitchen table, “emanating despair but … trying to smile.”
The deal they’d made was: “I’ll write. You live.” Except in these one-sided correspondences Marj’s compositional prompts start to feel as if they’re less for her sake than for the author’s: to keep not Marj alive, but Miriam. “Remember you asked me to make lists of words that were in and of themselves questions asking why?” Toews writes. “I might spend the rest of my life trying to complete this assignment.”
Perhaps that was the point, and the world of letters is better for it. “Why do I write? Because she asked me to.”
A TRUCE THAT IS NOT PEACE | By Miriam Toews | Bloomsbury | 180 pp. | $26.99
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