In this breathtaking memoir of stunning emotional force and electrifying honesty, one of Canada's most iconic writers tells her own story for the first time.

"Why does Miriam Toews write? A Truce That Is Not Peace answers the question in a hundred ways, all of them original, autobiographical, deeply painful, funny, oblique, confounding—just as those of us who believe her to be one of the greatest living North American writers have come to expect. A Truce That Is Not Peace is the best memoir you will read all year." —Nick Hornby, author of High Fidelity

“Why do you write?” the organizer of a literary event in Mexico City asks Miriam Toews. Each attempt at an answer from Toews—all unsatisfactory to the organizer—surfaces new layers of grief, guilt, and futility connected to her sister’s suicide more than fifteen years ago. She has been keeping up, she realizes, an internal correspondence with her beloved sibling, attempting to fill a silence she can barely comprehend. As Toews turns to face that silence, we come to see that the question “why I write” is as impossible to answer as deciding whether to live life as a comedy or a tragedy.
   A masterwork of non-fiction, A Truce That Is Not Peace explores the uneasy pact every creative person makes with memory. Wildly original yet intimately, powerfully precise; momentous, hilarious, wrenching, and joyful—this is Miriam Toews at her dazzling best, remaking her personal world and inventing a brilliant literary form to hold it.