A Truce That Is Not Peace by Miriam Toews: REVIEW
Synopsis
In this memoir slash stream-of-consciousness essay, Miriam Toews struggles to answer the question, “Why do I write?” while dealing with thoughts of suicide.
My Review
Word to the wise: This isn’t one for the easily triggered. In this era of dancing around the word “suicide” with alternatives like “unalived,” Toews doesn’t shy away from using the word or openly discussing the action. Every stream of her consciousness returns to this one deep, dark pool of despair.
And yet, she doesn’t lose herself to it. As the memoir progresses, it starts to feel less like a suicide note and more like a venting session. She jumps back and forth between various experiences in her life, most of them traumatic, but every once in a while her dark sense of humour comes out and lightens the mood, and you start to admire her fortitude. Toews says herself (to her therapist) that she isn’t suicidal, she just can’t stop talking about suicide. She lost her father and sister to suicide, and she’s facing the imminent loss of her mother to heart disease. It makes sense that she would be plagued by these thoughts. Putting them down on paper seems to be her way of gaining control of them.
In that sense, perhaps she isn’t struggling to answer “Why do I write?” after all.
The bottom line
Please don’t read this if it might send your own thoughts down a dark hole. Nobody needs to push themselves that far. But I think there’s encouragement here for those who are suffering grief or guilt over a loved one’s suicide. And there’s certainly literary merit here in the vein of Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath. So I both recommend it and don’t at the same time. Reader discretion advised, I guess is what I’m saying. But personally, I enjoyed it.
Many thanks to NetGalley and Penguin Random House Canada for providing this ARC for review consideration.
You can order A Truce That Is Not Peace here on Bookshop.org*, or look for it August 26 wherever you buy books.
*As an affiliate, I’ll receive a small commission from any purchase made through this link.