"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 every creative person 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.
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