Why do I write? Miriam Toews’s response to this impossible-to-answer prompt gives way to a haunting, tragi-comic, and incredibly moving inquiry into the landscapes and the people that define us; the parts of life that make no sense; and the things that, against all odds, keep us alive. A Truce That Is Not Peace is essential reading.”–Laura van den Berg, author of State of Paradise

An astonishing masterwork of memoir from one of our most renowned and acclaimed writers, telling pieces of her own story in nonfiction for the first time.

“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 story 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 a brilliant literary form to contain it.