An Unconventional Path Through Grief

A Truce That Is Not Peace
Miriam Toews
Knopf Canada
August 2025
$34.00

Miriam Toews has 10 published books and has won or been shortlisted for dozens of literary awards. She’s been named an Officer of the Order of Canada and is the 2025 Symons Medal winner. This is why Toews can release a book as unconventional as A Truce That Is Not Peace and still delight her fans.

This is Toews’s first memoir, and the way it’s written is unusual for the genre. There isn’t a clear beginning, middle, or end. The chapters vary in length, with no obvious reason to start or stop. There’s a shadow of a cohesive story; Toews shares family memories and letters sent between her and her late sister, but these are non-chronological and interrupted by imaginative tangents: lists of different kinds of winds, or quotes about writing, or infamous suicides throughout history.

To understand where these tangents begin and end, it is best to read the book in a visual format. However, accompanying the physical book with Toews’s narration on Audible adds to the experience, ensuring the tone of her unusual ideas are delivered as intended.

The book has Toews consider the question, “why do we write?” while also wrestling with the lives and suicides of her sister and father. These two family members would go through periods of not speaking to anyone, which felt more impactful to Toews than anything she could convey through words. Toews writes, “If silence says more, why write?”

Toews’s previous nine books have built trust with her loyal and widespread audience, so readers may be interested in hearing why their favourite Canadian author chooses to write — and why it’s often an uncertain choice. Toews is acknowledging her stage of life, exposing the grief that has coloured her work, and telling the world that she sometimes considers stopping altogether. She reflects on this halfway through the book, writing,

“I wanted to be a person who would say, smiling, I’m happily retired now, from everything, to be with my grandchildren, to spend time with my old mother, who will die soon…Yes, I’m an older woman, a calm woman, I’ve written enough things…”

Toews’s family, dead and alive, are the centre of this story. If the audience doesn’t care to know the answer to why Toews writes, they’ll stick around to connect with her vulnerability and charm. Readers will lament the death of her sister, laugh at the absurd comments of her mother, and celebrate the antics of her grandchildren.

Answering “why do we write?” is one of the many vehicles Toews uses to explore these familial relationships and the grief. These vehicles — which include a theoretical wind museum, a deranged skunk, and cleaning up blood puddles — reoccur throughout the book, popping up when you don’t expect them, illustrating the way our minds jump between ideas. You feel as though you’re inside Toews’s brain, and it’s messy and dark and relatable. Each time she calls back to one of these reoccurring elements, you feel as though you’re sharing an inside joke with a friend.

This chaos works. Grief is not predictable, and it shapes our actions, thoughts, and work. “A Truce That Is Not Peace, it is, in my mind, a letter to my sister. In a way, all of my books are, or that’s how I need to see them to write them,” Toews told AnOther Magazine.

A Truce That Is Not Peace is a place for weary and offbeat folks to rest and process grief of their own. Toews shows that even if life is rich — with successful books and an eccentric, loving family — the memory of those who have passed always lingers. This author uses her platform to publish one big cathartic release: a book full of her life-shaping memories, delightful sentences, and quirky motifs.