A Truce That Is Not Peace
I’ve attended seven funerals of friends who died by suicide. Most were for friends I knew through church, and all of them gutted me. So when asked if I would review Miriam Toews’s new memoir, I hesitated. I didn’t really want to face more suicides, let alone experience with the author her own morbid contemplations. But I’m so glad I did.
Toews is well known for novels like Women Talking and All My Puny Sorrows, and their subsequent motion pictures, along with the film Silent Light—each of which depicts the struggles of living in a strict Mennonite culture like the one in which she grew up in Manitoba. Here she offers something different: a memoir of her adult years which focuses on the years leading up to and following her father’s and sister’s suicides. She chronicles her family’s complicated history in imaginative prose that eschews chronological order and logical explanations, narrating a cohesive story through captivating motifs, trenchant humor, and heartrending details.
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The book’s title is from an essay by Christian Wiman, who declares that “we might remember the dead” by making a certain pact with the past: agreeing not to find closure in it while we hold the memories close. With such a truce intact, Toews recounts her story.
The suicides themselves are narrated matter-of-factly: years apart, father and sister each threw themselves in front of trains. Toews writes about her therapy with a Russian Jungian psychologist, which has helped her to confront her own suicidal contemplations. She also recounts the trauma of the silences her father and sister adopted before their suicides—both ceased speaking for long periods of time—and the absence of answers in their aftermath.
The memoir reads like a lengthy, braided essay, which she calls a “Prosastuckligeschaft.” Toews deftly weaves together a series of interconnected genres—quotations, letters, narrative, contemplative writing, and poetry—while offering nothing remotely close to religious platitudes.
This strategy is unusual and at first confused me. For example, the book begins with a 2023 letter from a writers’ conference inviting Toews to speak on the prompt “Why I write”; a letter Toews wrote to her sister Marjorie in 1995 about her loneliness, poverty, and literary agony; and a 2022 email from her mother, who accidentally pulled out an IV during a hospital stay. Soon, however, I realized how effectively Toews was setting up the book’s layered narrative while introducing one of its key refrains: “First order of the day was to clean up the blood,” her mother writes.
By the end of that chapter, we learn that Marjorie’s first period of silence happened in late adolescence and might have been learned behavior from her father. More periods of silence will follow, and Toews spends the rest of the book trying to figure out why.
Along the way, Toews deals with quotidian matters. One moment, she’s negotiating postdivorce finances with her ex; another moment she’s dealing with a skunk with distemper who keeps returning to the same spot beneath her house no matter how she tries to repel it. She also cares for her aging mother, who lives in a separate home Toews built on her property, much to her neighbors’ chagrin; fantasizes about opening up a museum that teaches visitors about every kind of wind, from siroccos to haboobs; and dreams repeatedly of getting shot in the face and watching her mouth fly down a long corridor, all while being angry she didn’t dodge the bullet.
In short, there is a lot going on in this story.
Toews deeply explores connections between silence, suicide, and writing. She ruminates about “narrative as failure,” labeling narrative a “douchebag” because “it will always fail to do the thing it sets out to do—which is to tell the truth.” She contemplates how her father and sister “wrote and wrote and wrote” amid lengthy periods of silence. Toews eventually asks her mother why they went silent. Her mother, the only member of the family who does not write, simply answers, “It was something they could control.”
In one chapter—which begins with a 2023 letter from the writing conference imploring Toews to complete the assignment—she takes us back to 1982, when she traveled through Europe. Her letters to Marjorie from Ireland, Italy, and elsewhere flood the chapter with details about her dysfunctional relationship with a boyfriend, her memories of past Sunday schools, her youthful indulgences, and her desire to conjure responses from her silent sister. No responses from Marjorie appear, so we, too, long to hear her voice.
The book’s penultimate chapter is also its shortest and most exquisite. In it, Toews centers a poem by Anne Carson. The poem (befitting her wind museum, Toews quips) depicts “a human body / trying to stand against winds so terrible that the / flesh was blowing off the bones.” Yet as the poem continues, we learn that this process is painless and cleansing. Toews then ties the imagery to further questions about her sister’s silence. She wonders whether Marjorie’s silence was a language all its own, an attempt to translate something, or perhaps a way to “hold on to something vital?”
And “if silence says something vital,” she wonders, “why write?”
Like clues to a mystery converging in sudden revelation, the final chapter then begins, “Why do I write? Because she asked me to.” The answer didn’t suffice for the writing conference committee, which by then had disinvited her. But no matter. Her sister asked her to write letters, so she did. A 1985 letter from Marjorie then gloriously appears, in which she writes to Toews, “I must say you have raised the imperative tense to new heights.”
Toews’s conclusion brings together all of the memoir’s motifs: “Silence. Suicide. Writing. Within all of these, we are holding. . . . Why must I draw a comparison between writing and suicide? To stay with her. To stay with them.”
By now, we understand why Toews doesn’t trust a single, traditional genre for her story. The fragmented narrative reflects the way her life unfolded from the certainty of fundamentalist community.
A Truce That Is Not Peace is an extra-ordinary memoir, impressive for its innovative style and tight structure. It is deeply moving, thanks to Toews’s original voice—attentive and attuned to the natural world, darkly humorous yet empathetic, unsparing as she remembers, with deep love, the dead.
