A request to explain why one composes prompted an associative, elliptical reckoning that unfolded into a new memoir. The resulting work confronts deaths, grief, and guilt that have informed creative output for nearly thirty years, offering haunting insights on living after tragic loss. Composing appears not as a means of redemption or resolution but as a way to inhabit and endure the unspeakable. Earlier novels drew on personal experience: a debut chronicled single mothers on welfare with playful humor, while a subsequent novel moved closer to small-town roots. The overarching arc traces calamity and contradiction alongside resilience and moral inquiry.
Blame George Orwell, who in 1946 famously published "Why I Write," an essay contending with the motives of "political purpose" and "aesthetic enthusiasm," which fueled his career, even while noting that the decision to put pen to paper is in some ways inexplicable. "Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness," Orwell wrote.
For Miriam Toews, the Canadian author of Women Talking and seven other novels, the "Why do I write?" reckoning came in 2023, when she was asked to prepare an essay on the topic to present alongside other authors at an event in Mexico City. Toews wasn't able to produce a response that satisfied the event's committee, but the question set her off on an elliptical, associative spiral that she shaped into A Truce That Is Not Peace, her new memoir.
The result is a layered confrontation with the deaths, grief, and guilt that have animated her work for nearly 30 years, providing haunting insights on how to live after tragic loss. Toews does not see writing as a means to redeem or resolve personal tragedy, but it nevertheless offers a way of living with the unspeakable. Toews has long plumbed the calamities and contradictions of her biography in her fiction.
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