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.
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.
