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 Toewsall of them unsatisfactory to the organizersurfaces new layers of grief, guilt, and futility connected to her sisters 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 humanethis is Miriam Toews at her dazzling best, remaking her world and inventing an astonishing new literary form to contain it.