Miriam Toews’ new memoir features letters she wrote to her sister, who she lost to suicide in 2010.Fred Lum/the Globe and Mail
Miriam Toews’s latest, A Truce That is Not Peace, is an attempt to answer an unanswerable question: Why does she write? The question comes in a letter from a foreign arts organization compiling answers from celebrated writers. Toews, of course, is highly accomplished: She has authored more than 10 books, won the Governor-General’s Award and been a Giller Prize finalist three times; the film version of her novel Women Talking won the 2023 Oscar for best adapted screenplay (by Sarah Polley).
So why does she write? In this new memoir, Toews dances around the inquiry as a way of brushing up against another, more important question: How is she to live through the grief of losing her sister to suicide in 2010, 12 years after their father similarly ended his life? A Truce That is Not Peace has an ingenious structure that features letters she wrote to her sister, Marjorie, along with essays and scenes from other parts of Toews’s life.
Both questions – why she writes and how to live with such grief – are ultimately unanswerable, but Toews creates beauty from that uncertainty.
The author recently spoke about her new work with The Globe.
A lot of the material that you cover in the new book seems to have inspired your 2014 novel, All My Puny Sorrows. Why did you want to revisit the themes outside of fiction, in a memoir format?
The older I get, the fewer answers I have. But, in an attempt to – a failed attempt, of course – answer your question, it was a way to be closer to my sister. It was a way to think about my sister. I wanted to do that, and I needed to do that.
A Truce That is Not Peace seamlessly moves through time and includes many letters you wrote to your sister from the perspective of your younger self. What made you want to include all these letters?
Letter-writing is a more intimate form of expression than, for instance, fiction. I mean, if it’s an honest letter. So I guess I was attempting to recreate that intimacy.
Why did you only include one of her letters?
In part, because I wrote more letters. Also, I was trying to think about this idea of silence; of her silence, her retreat into silence. I thought her silence would be more vivid if we only hear her voice at the end.
The silence is, obviously, a metaphor for your grief. But it’s also literal. Both your dad and your sister really did retreat and not speak for periods of their lives. Hence the tension you poke at in this book, where you try so many times to equate writing and silence, and always, as if by design, cannot.
Exactly. Always trying to find the similarities, always trying to meet her, trying to meet her there, in the silence, with writing.
You write something, you don’t really know why you’re writing it, what it’s going to be. And even after writing it, it still seems strange. At least this book did. It took me a while to understand what I was thinking, the psychology behind it. Why did I need to write this? And that just kind of reinforced everything that I know or could possibly say about what writing is. It’s a mysterious excavation – it’s like diving into some kind of black hole. But then, in the course of the writing, possibly, maybe, there’s some light. It’s always a mysterious process for me.
In the book, your mom tells you that she understands why her husband and her daughter decided to pursue silence – that she thinks it’s about control. But the way I hear you talk about writing is that it isn’t controlled.
That is really interesting. I don’t know, is she right? Is that why they were silent? Because it was something they could control?
Writing is something we think we’re controlling. Maybe there is some degree of control to it, in crafting a narrative and making certain choices with language et cetera. I think silence and writing, there is a connection. I’m still trying to figure it out and I’m sure I never will.
We see so many aspects of your life in this book, from playing with your grandkids to sharing frustration and success early in your career with your sister. And then there’s a section that is entirely just letters about you bumming around Europe with a comically toxic boyfriend.
Ha! The kind of boyfriend we’ve all had.
Those letters, she had asked me to write them. It seemed so desperate. Of course, it would be arrogant to think that by writing to her I would get to keep her alive. That’s not realistic. But in my mind, we had made a deal. Like, “Please, Miriam, write me letters, long letters about being in Europe,” and I said, “Okay, I will, if you promise to live.” It was such a dramatic, over-the-top sort of pact! There was no basis in reality.
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I’m old now, and I realize that it doesn’t matter: Writing letters is not going to keep a person from killing herself if she wants to kill herself. But at the time? I was 18, and she asked me to write her letters to narrate my life. It was the first time I had really done that, tried to write down what happened. In retrospect, I can romanticize it and say, okay, she was the instigator, she is why I write, I wouldn’t have done it if she hadn’t asked me to. But of course, we can’t really know if that’s true.
Suicide is all questions, without answers, only permanence. The way you handle the implied questions, stopping just short of letting something be the answer, is really powerful.
It’s just this human need to answer things, to come up with a reason, to make sense of something. People find it difficult, myself included, to live with the mystery and that blank space.
I’m attempting to live with it. But it’s hard. And so many of the books I’ve read on suicide, novels and memoirs and psychology books, always try to give answers. But it’s just not quite enough, it’s never quite accurate.
Let’s talk about clowns. There are a handful of references to clowns in A Truce That is Not Peace. One scene, where you’re with your young children, watching a clown fall over, made me laugh out loud.
Yes, that was so funny! I still talk about it with my kids to this day.
In one of the European letters, I say I was worried my boyfriend at the time just thought I was a clown. Like, who wants a girlfriend to be a clown? But I do kind of feel like I’m a clown. That’s embarrassing, obviously, mortifying even. Honestly, maybe being a clown is something that could be put on my gravestone. My children might put that there, if I could convince them to do it.
Do you feel like writing is clowning?
Definitely. In clowning, we can expose our vulnerabilities and strip ourselves of any pomposity. We can expose the errors and distance that come with the sense of coolness or hipness that we might put on as a way of dealing with being in the world, of living a life. Clowning allows you to connect to others in moments where we can see that being human is messed up, and we can just have a laugh. I think it’s a beautiful, joyful thing, and it’s a relief. I think it’s a relief to know I’m not alone in being so messed up. And that it’s funny.
One of the things you return to, both as a joke and as something serious, is the question of whether writing is an acceptable alternative to suicide.
Of course, I’m using that word, “acceptable,” a little bit ironically. It’s cheeky. I don’t believe that suicide is a sin. I understand that it’s an acceptable choice for a lot of people. And therefore I need to accept it as well. But writing as an alternative? Well, the reality is that I don’t think that writing is going to save a person from killing herself. Writing is obviously not something like, oh, actually, you know what, instead of dying, I’ll just write and then I’ll be fine!
I don’t know how well or happily I would live if I wasn’t writing – even though I always want to quit writing. When I wrote this book, I was feeling a sense of futility about writing, about how it’s so embarrassing.
Why is writing so embarrassing?
It just is. It’s embarrassing to take years or months, and all the heart and soul and pain and blood and guts, to put things on the page. But I need to write, and I need to drink water and eat food. It comes from such a need to connect, from such a lonely position. You just feel like, oh my God, I’m gonna turn myself inside out to attempt to write something that somebody else will be able to relate to – that way, we will have forged this connection, and I won’t be so alone in the world. And how embarrassing is that?
