Life Lines

Many of the details in Miriam Toews’s new memoir — most notably the deaths by suicide of her father in 1998 and her sole sibling in 2010 — will be familiar to readers of her eight novels and one previous book of non-fiction. Swing Low: A Life, published in 2000 and rendered in the imagined voice of Melvin Toews, was conceived as a way to assuage the pain of profound loss and to hear what he “might have talked about if he’d ever allowed himself to. If he’d ever thought it would matter to anybody.” In charting her father’s extraordinary efforts to shape an orderly existence, despite an early diagnosis of bipolar disorder, Swing Low was striking for its restraint.

A Truce That Is Not Peace is as original and poignant as the earlier text, though contrastingly fluid and dynamic. Written from Toews’s perspective, it foregrounds personal relationships — with her parents and sister, children and grandchildren, partners past and present — and contemplates enduring sorrow and joy. It is simultaneously an expansive investigation of the writing life.

In 2023, the Conversación Comité in Mexico City was sponsoring a panel of international authors on the theme of writing. Having agreed to participate, Toews was required to submit a response to the query “Why do I write?” Although her failure to supply a satisfactory statement led to rejection — the online program would feature her headshot “with a black bar through it, and the word CANCELLED”— the question inspired this work of exploratory depth that far surpasses the committee’s original parameters.

Toews began to write — in the literary sense of the word — at her older sister’s behest. In 1982, at the age of eighteen, she set out for Europe in the company of a boyfriend. “She asked me to write,” Toews says of Marj, “and I sent her letters. It had never occurred to me before that.” In fact, the “juvenile letters” that chronicled her youthful “cycling adventure” are incorporated into the larger narrative, which reviews phases in Toews’s life as it traces the development of her writerly self. Now that her muse is no longer alive, Toews asks, “If the reason why I write has removed the reason why I write, is it still reasonable to write?” The dilemma propels this project.

Toews posits writing and silence as comparable modes of self-expression: “if not quite the same thing, then allies — each a misdirection of the unspeakable, and each a way of holding on.” Both her father and her sister punctuated their lives with “long periods of silence.” Her father did not speak for a full year after Toews’s birth, and her sister descended into grim silence before her death. Yet, she wonders, since “all silence is language,” might it say more, is it more vital than writing?

While acknowledging the resemblance of writing and silence, Toews comes down on the side of story and its restorative potential. She regularly rehearses an affirming narrative for her mother: “that she was not a failure, that she did everything she could, that she couldn’t have saved my father and my sister in the end, that she had to survive and remain and breathe, for the rest of us, for herself, for me.” Toews writes to resurrect and decipher the past. She admits that writing is also about preserving emotional stability (she once considered drowning herself in the Assiniboine River). In doing so, she honours her beloved first reader, who by begging for letters had “taught me how to stay alive.”

In addition to her sister’s love — knowing, intimate, vitalizing — Toews celebrates her mother’s constancy as potent and sustaining. Her mother’s arms were a tender cradle during childhood. Her pluck ignited independence during Toews’s adolescence. Her affection and generosity — she whisked Toews away on a Caribbean cruise — helped counter the sadness of marital breakdown. Her compassion, even as she bore the private weight of grief and guilt for two suicides, succoured Toews. More recently, she has become a travel companion to and from Winnipeg, where Toews’s son lives with his family. As a devoted and playful great-grandmother, she has downplayed health concerns to avoid becoming a burden. Warm, protective, and sanguine, she remains a source of laughter and light.

This memoir eschews chronology and coherence in favour of recollection and montage. Six sections, composed of correspondence, memories, dreams, narrative, and quotations from other scribes, plus references to historical figures who took their lives, move through and across time. A grounding leitmotif of wind — Toews fantasizes about building “a Wind Museum” with galleries of “different types of wind”— as an unstoppable natural force, capricious, unseeable, yet ever present, denotes the rush of oncoming trains that killed her family members, as well as life’s changeability. Thus a reader must construct meaning out of disparate textual elements that combine by degrees to convey Toews’s sensibility. Understanding, for audience and author alike, unfolds slowly and recursively.

Unsettling encounters and situations are evoked. A fractious teenage romance, a disconcerting chance meeting with a former lover, and distressing financial negotiations with her ex-husband. Her father’s heart attack, her sister’s decline, and her mother’s advancing deafness. Her recurring nightmare “about getting shot in the face at very close range.” The belligerence of hostile neighbours and the habitual reappearance of a distempered skunk.

But in the end, A Truce That Is Not Peace is less overt revelation than tangled reflection. Toews craves quiet and calm, even as she rejoices in the hum and cheer of her shared property in Toronto, where household abundance is in full view at all times. On a single downtown lot, she and her partner occupy a laneway suite, alongside her mother and her daughter’s family of four, who dwell together in a separate residence.

These multi-generational ties confirm for Toews that writing is superior to silence. It staves off despair and commemorates loved ones, inspires levity and fosters hope. As the epigraph by the poet and essayist Christian Wiman announces so eloquently, “We might remember the dead without being haunted by them, give to our lives a coherence that is not ‘closure,’ and learn to live with our memories, our families, and ourselves amid a truce that is not peace.” For Toews, as for Wiman, writing always has been necessary and nourishing. “Writing is life,” she proclaims. “Being alive is worth something.”