A Truce That Is Not Peace - by Miriam Toews (Hardcover)

About the Book

"Revelatory." --New York Times Book Review
"Essential reading. A companion for turbulent times." --Laura van den Berg
"Nothing short of a masterpiece." --The San Francisco Chronicle

Named a Must-Read Book of the Summer by The Los Angeles Times, People Magazine, and Town & Country

Internationally bestselling author Miriam Toews' memoir of the will to write--a work of disobedient memory, humor, and exquisite craft set against a content-hungry, prose-stuffed society.

Book Synopsis

"Revelatory." --New York Times Book Review
"Essential reading. A companion for turbulent times." --Laura van den Berg
"Nothing short of a masterpiece." --The San Francisco Chronicle

Named a Must-Read Book of the Summer by The Los Angeles Times, People Magazine, and Town & Country

Internationally bestselling author Miriam Toews' memoir of the will to write--a work of disobedient memory, humor, and exquisite craft set against a content-hungry, prose-stuffed society.

"Why do you write?" the organizer of a literary event in Mexico City asks Miriam Toews. Each attempted answer from Toews--all of them unsatisfactory to the organizer--surfaces new layers of grief, guilt, and futility connected to her sister's 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 a writer makes with memory. Wildly inventive yet masterfully controlled; slyly casual yet momentous; wrenching and joyful; hilarious and humane--this is Miriam Toews at her dazzling best, remaking her world and inventing an astonishing new literary form to contain it.

Review Quotes

"Right from the start, A Truce That Is Not Peace reads like a whirling dervish of unbridled longing, bewilderment, sadness, anger, regret and joy that picks you up, swirls you around and doesn't let up until the dance, the storm-and, yes, the journey-is done." --The San Francisco Chronicle

"Revelatory . . . Like much of Toews' fiction, it is as fluent in the comic register as it is in the tragic . . . 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." --New York Times Book Review

"In this lyrical memoir, Toews explores her writing career with storytelling that is at once propulsive and recursive, using her work as evidence of both her success and her inability to escape her past. It's bracing, candid reading." --The Los Angeles Times, "30 Must-Read Books for Summer"

"A layered confrontation with the deaths, grief, and guilt that have animated [Toews'] work for nearly 30 years, providing haunting insights on how to live after tragic loss. . . 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." --The Atlantic

"Miriam Toews makes art on the line between writing and silence . . . This memoir's very existence fulfills the assignment of the question [''Why Do I Write?'], if sideways. In its final pages, Toews arrives at a sort of compromise between writing and silence, talking and not talking." --The Washington Post

"Unforgettable . . . Using a loose associative structure, Toews brings to light her subconscious, showing how grief tangles itself throughout one's mind, becoming part of its very wiring . . . Toews can't answer the question 'Why do I write?' satisfactorily to the literary event organizer. Instead, she delivers us something far more valuable." --Bookpage, starred review

"An incandescent read." --People Magazine, "Best Books of August"

"[Toews] will not avoid anything . . . A Truce That Is Not Peace is both an anguished commonplace book and an exhilarating brainstorm. Its winds whistle and wail." --The New York Review of Books

"Beguiling . . . There is intimacy in what Toews is willing to share and in the way she chooses to share it. Reading this memoir is like reading a journal: private, surprising, and vulnerable. 'Why do I write?' the imagined comité asks over and over again before rejecting Toews' answers and, ultimately, her participation at the conference. It's a shame, really. The answer to their question is here - sometimes whispered, sometimes howled. If only they would listen." --Washington Independent Review of Books

"A haunting meditation on writing and death . . . Toews unearths layers of grief in between bouts of profane humor . . . At once modest and profound, this slim volume packs a major punch. Readers will be wowed." --Publishers Weekly, starred review

"Epistolary at turns, poetic at others, always keenly observant . . . A fine turn to nonfiction by a superbly accomplished storyteller." --Kirkus Reviews

"A memoir in which [Toews] grapples with why she keeps returning to her sister's story, how reliable her memory is and whether she should be writing about this stuff in the first place. All of Toews' books are outstanding but if you have not read her, this could be a great place to start." --Minnesota Star-Tribune

"Miriam Toews is already beloved for her bestselling novels. In A Truce That Is Not Peace, the Canadian author dips her toe (or pen) into nonfiction, attempting to answer a question she was posed at an event years ago: why do you write? Her response is this wise and inventive book, part memoir, part meditation on memory and life." --Boston Globe

"A fast-paced, genre-bending examination not of [Toews'] reasons but rather her will to write. In short, sharp bursts of prose that are often both joyful and devastating on the same page, Toews excavates layer after layer of grief and guilt as she explores her uneasy pact with memory." --Poets and Writers

"[Toews'] voice blends dry humor with profound insight. You will feel this wise woman in the room with you as you read." --Center for Fiction

"The psychological acuity, imagination, vividness, and wise humor that shape her novels . . . energize Toews' creatively structured, gorgeously written, and flat-out astonishing memoir . . . the reader is whirlwinded by experiences bizarre, comedic, tragic, and wondrous." --Booklist

"Toews' latest book pivots on a question: 'Why do you write?' The answer ought to be a layup for a writer on book tour, or at least rehearsed enough by now to sound like it. Of course, it's not that simple. The question and her digressive answers give this slim, eclectic memoir - Toews' first - its motor and shape, as she draws on episodes across her life." --NPR

"The first time [Toews] has written about her life in nonfiction. The book began when a reader asked her, 'Why do you write?' Each answer felt unsatisfactory, which led her to explore what compels her to write-and what a moving, emotional result." --Town & Country, "Must-Read Books of Summer"

"The Canadian novelist answers a complicated question - Why do you write? - with this memoir that meditates on memory, creation, and grief as she comes to terms with her sister's suicide. There's nothing simple about grief, or about Toews's writing." --The Boston Globe, "75 New Books to Add to Your Summer Reading List"

"[Toews] delivers both a tender tribute to [her sister] Marjorie and a thought-provoking meditation on three linked themes: writing, silence and suicide. . . . Like her other books, Truce is both very serious and very funny. Her frankness and wit recall Anne Lamott, minus the sermonizing, while her short bursts of epiphanies recall Jenny Offill." --The Wall Street Journal

"Toews is vulnerable with readers in a new way, unpacking her personal tragedies and piecing together the parts of them that led her to become an author. This memoir is an emotional rollercoaster that is certain to strike readers with its honesty." --Bookstr

"A moving memoir." --The New York Post

"Sardonic and original . . . For her, writing is indeed a bulwark against despair. The result here is more incisive than sad--a heartening encouragement to persist." --Shelf Awareness

"Toews' prose is as unpredictable as the pictures she paints of her life . . . yet it all hangs together, sometimes with arresting strength, sometimes so precariously that you hold your breath . . . Those who open A Truce That Is Not Peace as their first encounter with Toews might be taken aback by its bold dissonance, but the best advice is to trust the process." --Bookreporter

"Engrossing . . . As in her novels Women Talking and Fight Night, the Toews we meet here doesn't just toe the line between the two extremes of [comedy and tragedy]; she proves there isn't one . . . the humor so prevalent here is a coping mechanism." --The Week

"Miriam Toews is one of my favorite writers . . . The book is not at all a craft guide, but it is a testament to how to process extraordinary grief and still find the will to live." --Maris Kriezman, The Maris Review weekly

"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

"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, a smart and wise companion for turbulent times." --Laura van den Berg, author of STATE OF PARADISE and THE THIRD HOTEL

"Everything written by Miriam Toews is giant-like, full of its own internal humor and strange weather, and A TRUCE THAT IS NOT PEACE is no exception. In trying to begin to answer why she writes, Toews ends by answering why she lives. A beautiful, breathtaking memoir." --Ingrid Rojas Contreras, author of Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award Finalist THE MAN WHO COULD MOVE CLOUDS

"Piercing and distilled, a masterpiece in vulnerability and performance. A Truce That Is Not Peace is a stunner." --Hannah Pittard, author of WE ARE TOO MANY

"I loved A Truce That Is Not Peace. It is written with such fiery brilliance that the sadness it contains is transformed into an affirmation of Life in all its richness and variety. This remarkable book will live forever." --Celia Paul, painter and author of SELF-PORTRAIT

About the Author

Miriam Toews is the author of the bestselling novels Women Talking, Fight Night, All My Puny Sorrows, Summer of My Amazing Luck, A Boy of Good Breeding, A Complicated Kindness, The Flying Troutmans, Irma Voth, and the nonfiction work Swing Low. She is the winner of the Governor General's Award for Fiction, the Libris Award for Fiction Book of the Year, the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize, and the Writers' Trust Engel/Findley Award. She lives in Toronto.