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Mark Boucher photo<\/p>\n
Miriam Toews says she still feels a sense of embarrassment about her writing, despite her widespread acclaim. <\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Toews is in Winnipeg Thursday to launch the book at McNally Robinson\u2019s Grant Park location at 7 p.m., where she\u2019ll be joined in conversation by local musician\/artist couple Christine Fellows and John Samson Fellows.<\/p>\n
The author of All My Puny Sorrows, Fight Night, A Complicated Kindness, Women Talking and other novels has long imbued her fiction with events from her life.<\/p>\n
Sorrows, for example, details the mental-health struggles and eventual death by suicide of a pianist, coming after Toews\u2019 sister Marjorie\u2019s suicide in 2010, the day before her 52nd birthday.<\/p>\n
Published by Knopf Canada in August, A Truce That Is Not Peace sees Toews, 61, circling around the question of why she writes.<\/p>\n
The book reflects on her delightfully chaotic home life in Toronto (she lives with her mother, her daughter and son-in-law and their children), on losing both her father and sister to suicide, on walking the frozen Assiniboine River and on meetings with her ex.<\/p>\n
The book\u2019s title stems from an essay by Christian Wiman called The Limit, which is included as Truce\u2019s epigraph.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat whole quote, the title, just seemed to really nail it in terms of what writing is, what life is, especially a grieving life. A truce \u2014 a happy, or somewhat happy, or at least doable truce \u2014 I feel may be as good as it gets,\u201d Toews says by phone prior to the Winnipeg stop of her book tour.<\/p>\n
Rather than being presented in a linear, tidy narrative, A Truce That Is Not Peace<\/a> offers fragments of ideas and snapshots in time, with Toews musing on moments in her life that helped shape the writer she is today.<\/p>\n \u201cI hope it sort of represents that chaos of the mind \u2026 the kind of fleetingness, the unknowingness, the uncertainty, the agony of a writer\u2019s mind and life \u2014 or at least my mind and life,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n \u201cI think there\u2019s some sort of instinct that comes to the fore \u2014 and then, in a sense, I\u2019m writing it but there\u2019s something guiding me. I don\u2019t know what it is.\u201d<\/p>\n The core question of the book \u2014 why Toews writes \u2014 inevitably and unsurprisingly proves unknowable, but Truce does offer both writer and readers a peek behind the curtain at how her novels have come to be.<\/p>\n \u201cI hope it sort of represents that chaos of the mind \u2026 the kind of fleetingness, the unknowingness, the uncertainty, the agony of a writer\u2019s mind and life \u2013 or at least my mind and life.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n \u201cThis book might explain a little bit to me, and maybe to the reader, what I was doing, or attempting to do, with the other books \u2014 where stuff came from, the thoughts and feelings, the emotions, experiences, everything \u2014 the synthesis of all that. It\u2019s a little bit of a light shone on that,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n Included in Truce are letters written to her sister Marj while Toews was on a European cycling trip with her then-boyfriend in the 1980s. Marj was already struggling with mental-health issues, and had implored Toews to pen letters to her while away.<\/p>\n \u201cShe was the instigator, the impetus, the catalyst or whatever you want to call it. At the time it felt like an obligation, a job, an assignment, something I had to do, and I took it seriously. I didn\u2019t want to do it, but when I got into it, I realized I was actually enjoying it, and so in that sense, everything I\u2019ve written was for her,\u201d Toews says.<\/p>\n \n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t A Truce That Is Not Peace reflects on Toews\u2019 home life in Toronto, losing both her father and sister to suicide, walking the frozen Assiniboine river and on meetings with her ex.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n While her father and sister each chose silence, opting to go months without speaking leading up to their respective suicides, Toews went in the other direction, feeling compelled to write her way through their struggles.<\/p>\n In revisiting those teenage letters to Marj, Toews got a sense of her writerly voice coming to life.<\/p>\n \u201cI could see my younger self struggling to tell a story, to entertain, really \u2014 it was writing to entertain her, and to make her laugh, hopefully. And also just the lack of inhibition. I was writing without any notion that those letters would ever be seen by anybody other than her, so there was so much freedom in that, so much intimacy, so much joy,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n Despite Toews\u2019 widespread acclaim and the adoration of legions of readers, she still feels a sense of embarrassment about her writing.<\/p>\n \u201cA lot of writers I talk to absolutely share that feeling \u2014 a sense of mortification. If you\u2019re writing with any kind of energy or conviction or intention, you\u2019re automatically exposing yourself, but at the same time, there\u2019s a reason for doing that, which is, \u2018Look, these are my thoughts \u2014 does anybody else have these thoughts? Am I alone out here?\u2019\u201d she says.<\/p>\n Yet, for Toews, there\u2019s still a feeling of accomplishment, albeit fleeting, in finishing a piece.<\/p>\n \u201cI still have these little twitches like, \u2018Oh, I should write.\u2019 And then you go back to the question of, \u2018Yeah, but why?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n \u201cThere\u2019s a sense when you think, \u2018OK, this is what I wanted to say \u2014 I don\u2019t know exactly why or how, but this feels right, this is it. I\u2019m done, finished, the end.\u2019 That\u2019s a really great feeling. The problem is it doesn\u2019t last very long \u2014 maybe three or four minutes \u2014 and then it\u2019s time to get back to work,\u201d she says, laughing.<\/p>\n Writing, these days, takes a backseat to embracing the chaos of Toews\u2019 house full of family.<\/p>\n \u201cMy grandchildren have sort of replaced the chaotic life force of creative energy. All I really want to do is hang out with my grandchildren before they become teenagers and they don\u2019t want to hang out with grandma all day,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n \n\t\tWinnipeg Free Press | Newsletter\n\t<\/p>\n \t\t\tDish<\/p>\n Every Second Friday<\/p>\n The latest on food and drink in Winnipeg and beyond from arts writers Ben Sigurdson and Eva Wasney.<\/p>\n \t\t\tSign up for Dish<\/a><\/p>\n \t\t Toews also spends a great deal of time caring for her mother Elvira.<\/p>\n \u201cThat\u2019s its own ongoing story as she gets older. There are these stories happening everywhere around me, but in the shape of real human beings, not necessarily characters in my mind.\u201d<\/p>\n Toews describes her care-giving responsibilities as a \u201cbeautiful distraction\u201d from her craft.<\/p>\n \u201cBut I still have these little twitches like, \u2018Oh, I should write.\u2019 And then you go back to the question of, \u2018Yeah, but why?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n ben.sigurdson@freepress.mb.ca<\/p>\n @bensigurdson<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t Ben Sigurdson<\/strong> Ben Sigurdson is the Free Press\u2018s literary editor and drinks writer. He graduated with a master of arts degree in English from the University of Manitoba in 2005, the same year he began writing Uncorked, the weekly Free Press drinks column. He joined the Free Press full time in 2013 as a copy editor before being appointed literary editor in 2014. Read more about Ben<\/a>.<\/p>\n In addition to providing opinions and analysis on wine and drinks, Ben oversees a team of freelance book reviewers and produces content for the arts and life section, all of which is reviewed by the Free Press\u2019s editing team before being posted online or published in print. It\u2019s part of the Free Press\u2018s tradition, since 1872, of producing reliable independent journalism. Read more about Free Press\u2019s history and mandate<\/a>, and learn how our newsroom operates<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n
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Literary editor, drinks writer
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