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...
Ruth Panofsky teaches English literature at Toronto Metropolitan University. She recently received the Royal Society of Canada’s Lorne Pierce Medal.
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