{"id":383461,"date":"2025-08-29T21:34:19","date_gmt":"2025-08-29T21:34:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/383461\/"},"modified":"2025-08-29T21:34:19","modified_gmt":"2025-08-29T21:34:19","slug":"the-books-briefing-why-miriam-toews-writes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/383461\/","title":{"rendered":"The Books Briefing: Why Miriam Toews Writes"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors\u2019 weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here.<\/a><\/p>\n

Two years ago, for an event in Mexico City, the Canadian novelist Miriam Toews was asked to compose an essay about why she writes. Her unsuccessful attempts to answer the question turned into her new memoir, A Truce That Is Not Peace<\/a>, which, as Kristen Martin wrote this week<\/a>, sees her reckoning with the suicides of her father and her sister, and examining the forces that made her an author. She turns to other writers\u2019 work for help, and finds one poet\u2019s reflection on grief and childhood especially useful.<\/p>\n

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic\u2019s books section:<\/p>\n

That essay is the poet Christian Wiman\u2019s<\/a> \u201cThe Limit<\/a>,\u201d which gives Toews\u2019s memoir its title. In it, Wiman looks back on the violence that marked both his childhood in West Texas and his family\u2019s history, and seems to gather that his past made his writing career inevitable. His conclusion is somewhat counterintuitive, because when he first began reading poetry, in college, he believed that \u201cit had absolutely nothing to do with the world I was from.\u201d But he no longer believes that assumption was entirely accurate. In poetry, he found something kinetic, and he relished \u201cthe contained force of its forms, the release of its music,\u201d which seemed to reflect the tumult of his youth. As a writer, Wiman describes \u201creinventing\u201d his past, hoping to turn it into a self-contained story that he could fully leave behind.<\/p>\n

Martin points to a different motivation in Toews\u2019s case. In the years since the deaths of her father and sister, writing has been a way to continue her conversations with them. Toews first began composing prose when she was a teenager and her older sister, Marj, asked her to send her letters. Decades later, after Marj\u2019s suicide, Toews continues putting pen to paper in search of some kind of organized story. Maybe that\u2019s why \u201cThe Limit\u201d so moved her\u2014in his essay, Wiman suggests that writing might allow us to \u201cremember the dead without being haunted by them, give to our lives a coherence that is not \u2018closure,\u2019 and learn to live with our memories, our families, and ourselves.\u201d Toews seems to understand that even if no sense can be made of her relatives\u2019 deaths, and even if she may never find peace, literature remains a way to honor her past. It is also, as Martin observes, a small, incomplete way to keep her family\u2014and herself\u2014alive.<\/p>\n

\"APierre Bonnard \/ Barnes Foundation \/ Bridgeman Images<\/p>\n

The Hardest Question for a Writer to Answer<\/strong><\/p>\n

By Kristen Martin<\/p>\n

For Miriam Toews, writing is a way of living with the unspeakable.<\/p>\n

Read the full article.<\/a><\/p>\n

What to Read<\/b><\/p>\n

Eating Stone: Imagination and the Loss of the Wild<\/strong><\/a>, by Ellen Meloy<\/strong><\/p>\n

When Meloy, a desert naturalist, felt estranged from nature, she sought to cure it by stalking a band of bighorn sheep<\/a> for a year in Utah\u2019s Canyonlands wilderness. She begins in winter and feels cold and clumsy. She envies the bighorns\u2019 exquisite balance as she watches them spring quickly up cliff faces. She feels \u201cthe power and purity of first wonder.\u201d Meloy\u2019s writing is scientifically learned\u2014beautifully so\u2014but this book does not pretend to be a detached study. When she hikes alongside these animals at dawn, she aches to belong. She fantasizes about being a feral child they raised. At first, the band is indifferent to her project. But animal by animal, they begin to let her into their world. To follow her there is to experience one of the sublime pleasures of contemporary American nature writing. Meloy gives an account of their culture, their affections for one another, even their conflicts. All these years after my first read, I can still hear the crack of the rams\u2019 colliding horns echoing off the red rock.\u00a0 \u2014 Ross Andersen<\/p>\n

From our list: The one book everyone should read<\/a><\/p>\n

Out Next Week<\/b><\/p>\n

\ud83d\udcda Trip<\/a>, by Amie Barrodale<\/p>\n

\ud83d\udcda Night Watch<\/a>, by Kevin Young<\/p>\n

\ud83d\udcda The Season<\/a>, by Helen Garner<\/p>\n

Your Weekend Read<\/strong>\"photoIllustration by Akshita Chandra \/ The Atlantic. Source: Getty.<\/p>\n

If the University of Chicago Won\u2019t Defend the Humanities, Who Will?<\/strong><\/p>\n

By Tyler Austin Harper<\/p>\n

Depending on whom I asked, the move to scale back humanities doctoral programs is either a prudent acknowledgment of the cratered job market<\/a> for tenure-track professorships and a wise attempt to protect the university\u2019s humanities division from looming financial and political risks, or it is a cynical effort, under cover of the Trump administration\u2019s assaults, to transfer resources away from \u201cimpractical,\u201d unprofitable, and largely jobless fields (such as, say, comparative literature) and toward areas that the university\u2019s senior leadership seems to care about (such as, say, STEM and \u201cinnovation\u201d<\/a>). One faculty member I spoke with mentioned a consulting firm<\/a> that was brought on to help Chicago as it considers changes to its humanities division, including possibly consolidating the departments from 15 down to eight. Many professors worried that the move to impose uneven changes\u2014reducing admissions in some while halting them in others\u2014may be an attempt to create circumstances that will ultimately make it easier to dissolve the paused programs. \u201cLet no good crisis go unleveraged,\u201d Holly Shissler, an associate professor in the Middle Eastern Studies department, said with a dark laugh. \u201cYou engineer a situation in which there are no students, and then you turn around and say, \u2018Why are we supporting all these departments and faculty when they have no students?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Read the full article.<\/a><\/p>\n

When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.<\/p>\n

Sign up for The Wonder Reader,<\/a> a Saturday newsletter in which our editors recommend stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight.<\/p>\n

Explore all of our newsletters<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors\u2019 weekly guide to the best in books. Sign…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":383462,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3938],"tags":[3444,77,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-383461","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-books","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115114205173060713","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/383461","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=383461"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/383461\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/383462"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=383461"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=383461"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=383461"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}