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

About the Book

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

"Essential reading. A companion for turbulent times." -Laura van den Berg

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

"Toews' new genre-bending memoir-an astute reflection on both the significance and the inadequacy of language, a bittersweet and often wry retelling of impactful moments from her life, and a profoundly moving meditation on the frailty of memory and the permanence of loss-is nothing short of a masterpiece . . . 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

"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"

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

"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. A Truce That Is Not Peace is a guttural exhumation of grief that ultimately weighs the joys of living against its sorrows, and tries to figure out why some of us can't endure the math. Formally inventive and exquisitely executed, Toews' memoir shows us that bearing witness to one's own grief-however disjointed, morbid or painful it is-can grant reprieve." --Bookpage, starred review

"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

"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

"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

"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

"Miriam Toews writes hilariously about the saddest things . . . bringing her trademark wry humor to the page as she excavates her life as a writer, sister, daughter and friend." --Bookpage

"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"

"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

"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

"Scorching . . . A wry, freewheeling novel of ideas that touches on the nature of evil, questions of free will, collective responsibility, cultural determinism, and, above all, forgiveness." --New York Times Book Review, Editor's Choice on international bestseller WOMEN TALKING

"Miriam Toews is wickedly funny and fearlessly honest . . . She is an artist of escape; she always finds a way for her characters, trapped by circumstance, to liberate themselves." --The New Yorker on international bestseller WOMEN TALKING

"Ardent, hilarious, and moving." --NPR.org on FIGHT NIGHT

"In the crucible of [Miriam Toews'] genius, tears and laughter are ground into some magical elixir that seems like the essence of life." --Ron Charles, The Washington Post on ALL MY PUNY SORROWS

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.