Truce That Is Not Peace

Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, AutobiographyNAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORKER, TIME, THE WASHINGTON POST, THE WASHINGTON INDEPENDENT REVIEW OF BOOKS, NPR, LIT HUB, ELECTRIC LITERATURE, AND BOOKPAGE"e;Revelatory."e; -New York Times Book Review"e;Essential reading. A companion for turbulent times."e; -Laura van den Berg"e;Nothing short of a masterpiece."e; -The San Francisco ChronicleInternationally bestselling author Miriam Toews' memoir of the will to write-a work of disobedient memory, humor, and exquisite craft set against a content-hungry, prose-stuffed society."e;Why do you write?"e; 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 a writer 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.