A Truce That Is Not Peace - Miriam Toews

Category: Misc. Non-fiction
Language: English
Keywords: Canada Grief Loss Memoir Mental Health Writing

Written by Miriam Toews
Read by Miriam Toews
Format: M4B
Bitrate: 64 Kbps
Unabridged

“… we might remember the dead without being haunted by them, give to our lives a coherence that is not ‘closure,’ and learn to live with our memories, our families, and ourselves amid a truce that is not peace.”
—Christian Wiman

“Essential reading. A companion for turbulent times.” -Laura van den Berg

Internationally 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.

“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 listeners, 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.

Length: 3 hrs and 44 mins
Release date: 08-26-25