Upon reaching a certain level of renown, an author can expect to be asked why they write. Blame George Orwell, who in 1946 famously published “Why I Write,” an essay contending with the motives of “political purpose” and “aesthetic enthusiasm,” which fueled his career, even while noting that the decision to put pen to paper is in some ways inexplicable. “Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness,” Orwell wrote. Or blame Joan Didion, who in 1976 borrowed Orwell’s title for a talk she delivered at UC Berkeley. As she put it: “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.”
For Miriam Toews, the Canadian author of Women Talking and seven other novels, the “Why do I write?” reckoning came in 2023, when she was asked to prepare an essay on the topic to present alongside other authors at an event in Mexico City. Toews wasn’t able to produce a response that satisfied the event’s committee, but the question set her off on an elliptical, associative spiral that she shaped into A Truce That Is Not Peace, her new memoir. The result is a layered confrontation with the deaths, grief, and guilt that have animated her work for nearly 30 years, providing haunting insights on how to live after tragic loss. Toews does not see writing as a means to redeem or resolve personal tragedy, but it nevertheless offers a way of living with the unspeakable.
Toews has long plumbed the calamities and contradictions of her biography in her fiction. She made her debut in 1996 with Summer of My Amazing Luck, a playful, humorous novel that follows the adventures of single mothers on welfare who are living in an apartment complex in Winnipeg and raising their children alone, as Toews herself did in her early 20s. With her follow-up, A Boy of Good Breeding, the author drew closer to her roots in small-town Manitoba with a zany plot about a single mother who gets looped into a plan to help the local mayor meet the prime minister. Both novels feature versions of Toews’s parents—her preternaturally optimistic and resolute mother, Elvira, and her beloved, depressive father, Melvin. But it wasn’t until after Mel’s death, in May 1998, that Toews began to publish work that deals with the darkest parts of her life.
Her first book in this vein is her only other work of nonfiction—though it relies on conjecture. In Swing Low, Toews channels her father’s voice to tell the story of his life up until his final moments. A devout schoolteacher who spent his life in Steinbach, Manitoba (a town Toews has described as rigid and repressive), Mel was diagnosed with manic depression at age 17. During the first year of Toews’s life, he was completely silent—not his first or last such spell. (For her part, Toews writes of that year in A Truce That Is Not Peace: “I screamed non-stop.”) Not long before he died, Mel had a heart attack that forced him to quit teaching. He stopped eating and was hospitalized for depression. In his last hours, he persuaded the hospital to release him on a day pass and hitchhiked to a train crossing, where he died by suicide.
Almost exactly 12 years after Mel’s death, Toews’s sister, Marjorie, died by the same method a day before she would have turned 52. Marj had long lived with severe depression, and versions of her appear in a number of Toews’s novels. The Flying Troutmans, for instance, follows a pair of sisters—the older one suicidal, the younger one wayward and yet dedicated to keeping her sister alive. (Marj considered that book a “Valentine” to her.) Toews revisited this dynamic in her wrenching, cry-until-you-laugh cult classic, All My Puny Sorrows, which refracts through fiction the end of her marriage and her desperation to save Marj’s life—though what her sister wanted most was help dying.
“I had no words,” Toews has said about the immediate aftermath of Marj’s death. “It took a couple of years before I thought, No, I’m a writer. This is what I do, take stuff and work it into something that makes sense to me.” But in A Truce That Is Not Peace, Toews wrestles with how her father’s and sister’s suicide continue to elude rationalizing, and with her own impulse to write about them—and for them.
She takes her title from the poet Christian Wiman’s essay “The Limit,” which she quotes throughout her book. Wiman’s stance against easy resolution in the face of devastating grief serves as something of a guiding light for Toews. “We might remember the dead without being haunted by them, give to our lives a coherence that is not ‘closure,’ and learn to live with our memories, our families, and ourselves amid a truce that is not peace,” Wiman writes. In seeking that truce, Toews unlocks a more candid meditation on such painful losses than she has previously offered in fiction, one that will likely ring true to anyone who has had to find their way forward after the death of a person around whom they had organized their life.
Without the constraints of the novel—namely the need to advance a plot—Toews lets her mind loose on the page. Structured in six discursive parts, each leading with a reminder of the task she was given by the Mexico City event committee, A Truce That Is Not Peace leaps among fragments of memory; images from recurring nightmares; lists of suicide methods used by notable figures; musings on Toews’s dream of opening a wind museum; absurd anecdotes from daily life as both a grandparent and a caregiver to an elderly mother; and decades-old letters Toews wrote to her sister. The reader bobs along in the author’s stream of consciousness, riding crests of despair, anger, and hilarity as Toews assembles the shards of her past to investigate her will to write, which is deeply entwined with her will to live.
About those letters to Marj: Toews submits them to the event committee, which concludes, as Toews puts it, that these “juvenile letters” are “not appropriate” as a response to “Why do I write?” Yet Marj “is the reason why I’m a writer,” Toews tells the committee. “She asked me to write, and I sent her letters. It had never occurred to me before that.” As Toews gradually reveals in A Truce That Is Not Peace, Marj first made that request in 1982, when she was 24, after leaving university and moving back to her childhood bedroom, in Steinbach, where she “stopped making sounds altogether.” (“Had my father taught her this?” Toews wonders.) Instead, Marj wrote “on yellow lined paper, her neat sentences straight at first, then dipping downwards at the end like rigid fishing rods with baited lines.” When Marj asked her sister to write her letters, Toews was 18, heading to Europe with her boyfriend. “Yes, I’ll write,” Toews responded. “You live. And I’ll write.” Marj agreed with a smiley face and the word deal.
Twenty-eight years later, when Marj died, Toews was left to reckon with why her sister—and father—had chosen “bewildering silence,” first temporarily and then forever. Toews writes that she initially saw her inexorable urge to write, to fill silence, as diametrically opposed to their refusal to speak. But the more she tests this theory, questioning if silence is “the disciplined alternative to writing,” the more Toews comes to see that even though her writing failed to keep her sister alive, it has kept her alive. “Silence and writing are, if not quite the same thing, then allies—each a misdirection of the unspeakable, and each a way of holding on,” she observes. In writing, Toews can linger with her father and sister.
In this way, A Truce That Is Not Peace reads like a culmination of Toews’s career-long project of keeping her family members alive—their joys as well as their sadness. Yet the reader emerges with the feeling that she will continue to write, for Marj and, in many ways, to Marj, seeking her out in the places between silence and words.
The post How Miriam Toews Lives With the Unspeakable appeared first on The Atlantic.
