A Truce That Is Not Peace

In her first work of nonfiction, acclaimed novelist Miriam Toews turns her gaze inward in a raw, luminous meditation on grief, memory, and the impossible task of explaining why we write.

When a literary event organizer in Mexico City asks Toews a simple question—“Why do you write?”—the answer eludes her. Each attempt brings her closer to the aching silence left by her sister’s suicide, revealing the invisible dialogue she’s carried on for decades. What begins as a public conversation spirals into a deeply personal reckoning: with loss, with love, and with the uneasy peace we try to make with pain.

A Truce That Is Not Peace is Toews at her most inventive and vulnerable—an intimate, genre-defying exploration of the stories we tell to keep ourselves alive. By turns playful, devastating, and profoundly human, this is a luminous reflection on art, sorrow, and the porous boundary between fiction and truth.