Brutal frankness, things you want to look away from but are forced to confront (and probably should be), humour and trauma, it's all there, uncompromising as she is in her novels, too. It feels a little disjointed sometimes, but that's her life, too.

God I just love Miriam Toews. This is a memoir that has Toews repeatedly grappling with the question ‘why do you write?’.

Toews life has been marked by significant tragedy which is naturally a central theme here. But this book is also funny & deeply charming.

Like her fiction the relationships absolutely sing, especially those with her mum & grandkids. I loved the shenanigans & chaos! There was so much warmth & love emanating from these pages it was a joy to spend time among them. Even through the sadness.

I’m not too hung up on why Miriam Toews writes, I’m just incredibly thankful that she does.

A powerful memoir. This is partly a memorial to the author’s sister who committed suicide. It’s also about what she feels about being a writer and all her other familial relationships. A lot of it is sad but it ends with a happy family scene. Makes me want to read more by Miriam Toews.

A Truce That Is Not Peace is an extraordinary and deeply moving memoir that showcases Miriam Toews at her most inventive, vulnerable and humane. For the first time, she turns to nonfiction to explore the question of why she writes, a question posed by a literary committee in Mexico City. Her attempts to answer lead to reflections that are anything but straightforward, unravelling grief, silence and memory in ways that resist tidy conclusions.

The book unfolds through fragments rather than chronology, blending letters, family vignettes, humour and heartbreak. Toews writes about her sister Marj’s suicide with both tenderness and raw honesty, showing how grief permeates every act of storytelling. Yet her voice is never without wit, warmth and flashes of joy, which makes the memoir as life-affirming as it is heart-wrenching.

What makes this work so powerful is its refusal to conform. It is playful and experimental in form while being profound in its emotional depth. By weaving silence, memory, suicide and writing into an ongoing conversation with herself and with us, Toews captures the messy contradictions of life and creativity.

This is a luminous and unforgettable memoir that asks difficult questions without ever pretending to hold easy answers. It is at once an exploration of art, love, grief and resilience, and a testament to the way writing can both wound and heal.

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4.5* - Miriam contemplates "why she writes" with her classic breezy blend of humor and heartache, poignancy and pain. She reflects on a life lived as a writer in response to her sister's (and father's) mental health struggles. This is a story of people who live on when loved ones take their own lives. There's a desire to understand after decades. An acknowledgement that it's hard, deeply sad to continue. She shares snippets of the past juxtaposed with the present, which is full of chaotic grandkids and aging mothers and life. It is not something that can be understood. Only survived. And for her, that is why she writes.

Miriam Toews delivers one of the best books of the year with her creative memoir, 'A Truce That Is Not Peace'. Toews's ostensible reason for writing the memoir was to answer the questions, "Why do I write? What is your reason?" She uses this as a starting point for examining the idea of writing and silence, and how the act of writing has influenced her family and relationships. Toews also looks at the influence of her father and sister's suicides and how their silences left so many unanswered questions.

Toews has a wicked sense of humour and I was cackling with laughter at Toews's brilliant wit and the way she structured the narrative of her life. Toews's description of a teenage relationship with a young man named Wolfie could have been made into its own book. Toews even makes the act of walking through frigid weather into something masterful and engrossing. Every page brings a new surprise. If there's a downside to this book, it's the short length. I wanted so much more. It's that good.

In Toews' first memoir, she weaves a deeply poetic and intellectual narrative of writing and death. It's powerful and a great addition to read alongside her autobiographical novels.

I love Miriam Toews’ writing, and this memoir of scattered thoughts (on grief, ageing, families and time) didn’t disappoint. The letters to her sister from her time travelling in Europe in the 1980s were a particular gem for me as a Brit (“it’s Tems and Sen not Tames and Sane”) - sweetly funny but also conjuring up a real sense of disconsolate, aimless wandering.

The contrast between Toews’ youthful self and her current self - a grandmother with an ailing mother of her own, the lynchpin of a family - is a big theme of the book, as is the experience of grief. A lovely and lyrical read.

Miriam Toews fans will enjoy this, as I am and did.

The written relationship of being a mother, grandmother, sister and daughter was honest and moving.

The only slight downside is that some of the material has been approached in her other books.

I rediscovered Miriam Toews on a recent holiday to Canada and have been belting through her books ever since. Her writing is sharp and incisive. I love the way she mixes a brutal frankness with a delicate poetic beauty in her writing. This is a collection of writing from her own life, moving back and forth in time from her teen years to the present day. Alongside the autobiographical sections weave the project she is supposed to be putting together for a festival where she is supposed to submit an essay on why she writes and her dreams of opening a museum of winds. The word whimsy isn't solid enough for the places this brilliant writing takes you because at times it is just too dark, but there are such flights of imagination and beauty here that lift it into something approaching whimsy. I'd say it's indescribably brilliant stuff.

A Truce That Is Not Peace is an inventive memoir of voice, identity and grief from writer Miriam Toews.

Toews has been asked to write a piece on 'Why do you write' for a literary event, which she repeatedly fails to do. But in this eclectic collection of memories, all of which in some way play with the themes of voice and language, she answers this question and more. Writing is at the heart of her identity, her connections with her family and her understanding of the world and the trauma she has experienced: it is as essential as breathing.

As a piece of autofiction, I didn't find this entirely fluid. Sometimes the tonal shifts between light and dark are effective, at others jarring. But as a literary memoir, it's powerful.

Always balancing humour and tragedy with such fierce wit and, most importantly, heart, this is a surprising and deeply moving look back on death, previous relationships, family and the life as a writer. The perfect companion to Toews’ acclaimed novels.

This is such a powerful, brutally honest book by Miriam Toews, everything you would expect from a memoir by her. She writes about grief, guilt and her writing, and within it all tries to come to terms with her sister’s suicide. As always with her books she packs no punches, but somehow manages to write about deep trauma with a dose of humour thrown it. This book won’t be for everyone but I feel sure if you like Miriam Toews you’ll love this.

I was so looking forward to an opportunity to read A Truce That is Not Peace by Miriam Toews as she is my favourite writer and it lived up to all my expectations. She explores what it means to be a writer, a daughter, a sister, a mother, a grandma.

In April 2023, Miriam Toews is grappling with a question which she and her fellow panellists at a Mexican literary event must answer: Why do I write? She sends several replies, all rejected. She writes because her sister asked her to. Marj, to whom the book is dedicated, took her own life in 2010. The writing question is the hook on which Toews hangs this brief, raw yet beautifully written memoir but it's Marj who is at the heart of it.

Toews’s writing, a process which seems more akin to self-torture than enjoyment, began with the letters she wrote to Marj when her sister was ill and shut off from a world which she, herself, had begun to explore. Their father was bipolar, a teacher and a good one, who took his own life. Marj struggled with depression all her life, taking to periods of silence just as he had done. If you’ve read her fiction, you’ll likely know that All My Puny Sorrows draws heavily on the loss of her sister and will also be familiar with the mix of humour and darkness that characterises her work.

The book ends on a hopeful note with a lovely family scene: Toews’s redoubtable mother has been asked to keep score while her greatgrandchildren prepare themselves for ‘the world’s most epic lightsabre battle’.

My experience of reading Toews' fiction is that it flouts convention. This is why I love her work. This memoir is similarly off-script.

She is asked (with other writers) to produce a piece for a conference on "Why do you Write". Her responses play out through this memoir. None of them fit the conference brief. This is exactly the point, my opinion is that writers respond to life in a million ways and cannot be boxed into what is expected and this is the joy of reading.

Toews' life bleeds into her fiction so this work is not unexpected. She was brought up in a Mennonite community and inevitably the suicide of her sister and the long silences in her family colour her world. The narrative is episodic, back and forth (non-linear) through life's happenings and her contemporary and reflected emotions.

Her skill in balancing deep trauma with humour is extraordinary. The layering of her life is compulsive and I found it revealed itself in much of the way that we all get to know people, superficial to in-depth in fits and starts.

I loved this. I love that she does not conform and for myself I find that Toews' response to "Why Do You write" is just perfect. Works for me.

With thanks to #NetGalley and #4thestatebooks for the opportunity to read and review