This book was my introduction to Toews' work and I'm hooked. Her memoir is a response (or non-response) to the prompt "Why do I write?" It is powerful, exquisitely detailed, and takes you on a journey through loss and tragedy with lots of humor. I also learned a lot about wind. You must read it for yourself! For anyone who has lost someone close to them and is working through it...
Publisher description:
Why do you write? the organizer of a literary event in Mexico City asks Miriam Toews. Each attempted answer from Toews-all of them unsatisfactory to the organizer-surfaces new layers of grief, guilt, and futility connected to her sister's suicide. She has been keeping up, she realizes, a decades-old internal correspondence, filling a silence she barely understands. And we, her readers, come to see that the question is as impossible to answer as deciding whether to live life as a comedy or a tragedy. Marking the first time Toews has written her own life in nonfiction, 'A Truce That Is Not Peace' explores the uneasy pact a writer makes with memory. Wildly inventive yet masterfully controlled; slyly casual yet momentous; wrenching and joyful; hilarious and humane -- this is Miriam Toews at her dazzling best, remaking her world and inventing an astonishing new literary form to contain it.