A Truce That Is Not Peace
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A Truce That Is Not Peace
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Narrated by:
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Miriam Toews
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By:
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Miriam Toews
In this breathtaking memoir of stunning emotional force and electrifying honesty, one of Canada's most iconic writers tells her own story for the first time.
“Why do you write?” the organizer of a literary event in Mexico City asks Miriam Toews. Each attempt at an answer from Toews—all unsatisfactory to the organizer—surfaces new layers of grief, guilt, and futility connected to her sister’s suicide more than fifteen years ago. She has been keeping up, she realizes, an internal correspondence with her beloved sibling, attempting to fill a silence she can barely comprehend. As Toews turns to face that silence, we come to see that the question “why I write” is as impossible to answer as deciding whether to live life as a comedy or a tragedy.
A masterwork of non-fiction, A Truce That Is Not Peace explores the uneasy pact every creative person makes with memory. Wildly original yet intimately, powerfully precise; momentous, hilarious, wrenching, and joyful—this is Miriam Toews at her dazzling best, remaking her personal world and inventing a brilliant literary form to hold it.
©2025 Miriam Toews (P)2025 Knopf CanadaCritic reviews
"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."—Laura van den Berg, author of The Third Hotel
"Everything written by Miriam Toews is giant-like, full of its own internal humor and strange weather. In trying to answer why she writes, Toews ends by answering why she lives. A beautiful, breathtaking memoir."—Ingrid Rojas Contreras, author of The Man Who Could Move Clouds
"This small book is bursting with hilariousness and suffering and rage and also so much tenderness that the pages are practically flying off like paper-airplane love letters. I would have read another thousand chapters."—Catherine Newman, New York Times bestselling author of Sandwich and We All Want Impossible Things