"I really wanted to be a journalist,” Miriam Toews says via Zoom from her home in Toronto, “but I started writing fiction.” Now, after eight novels, stints on bestseller lists, numerous awards, and a lone memoir from 2001, she’s back to writing nonfiction.
A Truce That Is Not Peace, out from Bloomsbury in August, begins in April 2023, when Toews is invited to participate in a literary conference in Mexico City and asked to submit an answer to the question, “Why do you write?” Her response, which included stories from her life and the lives of writers who died by suicide, eventually became her second memoir. It’s a reflection on writing that also explores the author’s deep relationship with her sister, who died by suicide in 2010, and attempts to make sense
of the past, while acknowledging the difficulty of such an undertaking.
Toews admits the book is “odd” in terms of her body of work. “It’s a bit of an anomaly,” she says. “It was a time in my life when I was despairing a bit about writing, thinking that it was a futile thing to do and at the same time thinking that it was such an urgent necessity. I was building a wall up in my mind and knocking it down at the same time.”
Despite any uncertainty she felt, Toews’s wry humor is evident from the early pages of A Truce That Is Not Peace: “My partner, E.,” she writes, “said last evening: ‘I know you people (meaning my family) don’t talk about your pain, you just kill yourselves.’ My daughter and I were impressed with the genuine comic worth of that statement.”
Born in 1964 in Manitoba, Canada, Toews grew up in a strict Mennonite community. Her mother was a social worker and therapist and her father a teacher. When she was growing up, both her father and sister, Marjorie, suffered from depression and were prone to long periods of silence. “One time my father was silent at home, though not at work, for a year,” Toews says. “My sister’s silences would last for a few days or a few months. Sometimes she’d write things down instead of talking.” In 1998, Toews’s father died by suicide; her previous memoir, Swing Low: A Life, recounts his struggles with manic depression.
Toews says she knew from a young age that she’d have to leave the Mennonite community. “It was not a closed colony, like some Mennonite communities, but the rules and expectations from the church were the same. I left immediately after finishing high school and never lived there again. I went to Montreal, to university. I missed my family, but I didn’t miss the community itself.”
In 1987 Toews received a BA in film studies from the University of Manitoba; in 1991, she got a journalism degree from University of King’s College, Halifax. Her sister also left the community for college, but her mother remained in Toews’s hometown of Steinbach until the death of her husband. “My mother is the most amazing person, incredible—I think of her as the love of my life,” Toews says. “She has always been unconditionally 100% supportive.”
After leaving their Mennonite community, her mother provided a haven for other women who wanted to leave, Toews says. “Sometimes they didn’t want their fathers or husbands to know. There were death threats and a bounty on my mother’s head, but it didn’t faze her while it scared me and the rest of us.” Toews’s mother will be 90 this summer and still belongs to a Mennonite church. “A very liberal progressive, good, beautiful Mennonite church, completely different from the one she and I grew up in.”
After getting her journalism degree, Toews’s first job was working as a “traffic girl” for a small radio station in Manitoba. Additionally, she made radio documentaries and wrote for magazines and newspapers. During this period, she also started writing
her first novel. “I sent the manuscript out to a bunch of small presses in Canada, and it was eventually published by a small local press in Winnipeg called Turnstone,” Toews says. “I had told myself that if I couldn’t get that novel published I would stop writing fiction
and do something else. I’m lucky it was published, because I honestly don’t know what I would have done instead. All I’ve ever wanted to do is write.”
Toews’s novels—which include A Complicated Kindness, All My Puny Sorrows, and Women Talking—explore the Mennonite community, sisterhood, mental illness, single motherhood, and family dynamics. The writing is character driven, smart, and funny despite the serious subject matter. All of which is on display in A Truce That Is Not Peace, which PW’s starred review called a “haunting meditation on writing and death” that is “at once modest and profound.”
Toews says that while A Truce That Is Not Peace wasn’t a book she’d always wanted to write, the memories she explores in its pages are always with her. “It was only in the last few years, turning 60 and having all these grandchildren,” she says. “It was a time in my life to just sort of stop and take stock and reflect.” And that naturally led her to think deeply about her sister. “She figures so largely in my writing,” Toews says. “She’s why I started writing and why I continue to write.”
In one section of the book, Toews recreates letters she wrote to her sister in 1982, after Marjorie had left university and moved back into the family house. “My sister was an intellectual, an anxious person in a community where it wasn’t acceptable,” Toews says. “She was depressed, fragile, like an egg, and she said, ‘Promise me you’ll write me letters.’ I knew she was suicidal, and the deal was I would write if she promised to stay alive, which is a ridiculous thing to get a person to promise. But then she did end her life, and there I was, a writer still writing.”
Toews says she views her sister’s long silences as a method of self-protection and an expression of suffering—something that is similar to writing. “I always feel the futility and yet the absolute necessity,” she says. “It’s always a failure, and we write and write and write and think maybe this time we will get it.” As she writes in A Truce That Is Not Peace, “Why did they do it, my father and sister? Is writing the acceptable alternative to killing oneself? Does suicide end the pain and preserve the truth? Does writing attempt to achieve the same thing, and are both suicide and writing incomprehensible?”
While exploring those questions may have led Toews to write nonfiction again, her efforts did not impress the hosts of that literary conference in Mexico City, who dropped her from the event after reviewing her response to the “Why do you write?” prompt. “I haven’t adequately answered the question, they tell me, and my submission has been rejected,” she says.
