A Truce That Is Not Peace

Novelist Toews (Fight Night) delivers a haunting meditation on writing and death in her first work of nonfiction. When Toews was invited to a literary conference in Mexico City, organizers asked her to submit an answer to the question “Why do you write?” Personal anecdotes, literary quotes, and biographical snippets about authors who died by suicide tumbled onto the page in response. Expanding on those thoughts, Toews unearths layers of grief in between bouts of profane humor (“My four-year-old grandson calls his one-year-old brother a fucking noodle head, and now I’m the one in a trouble”) and mundane memories of backpacking trips and encounters with wildlife near her Toronto home. Her father and sister both killed themselves, each enveloped by long bouts of silence before their deaths, and Toews struggled to hold on in the aftermath, dreaming of being shot in the face and envisioning her own drowning. While often conversational, Toews’s prose has the power stop the reader in her tracks: “Silence and writing are, if not quite the same thing, then allies,” Toews muses, “each a misdirection of the unspeakable, and each a way of holding on.” At once modest and profound, this slim volume packs a major punch. Readers will be wowed. (Aug.)