Why write? It’s a question authors are often asked, and ask themselves, as they navigate the uncertain path of a life made through language. “Why do I write?” For Miriam Toews the question loomed so large it became the starting point for her 10th book, A Truce That is Not Peace.
An unconventional work of memoir, the book opens with an invitation to join a “conversación” on the topic in Mexico (a “pastiche”, she says, of all the times she’s been asked why she writes), and unfurls into a reflection on language, narrative, silence, memory, life and death. At the book’s heart are two inescapable tragedies: the death of Toews’s father Melvin in 1998 and, most prominently, the death of her sister Marjorie, 12 years later, both by suicide.
“[The book] is sort of an argument with myself, really,” Toews says, across a video call. “I was feeling a futility about writing. I was thinking about silence” – throughout their lives, afflicted with depression, Toews’s sister and father would each descend into inexplicable periods of silence. “I was thinking a lot about my sister. I was trying to connect with her in a way, and I was missing her ... I wanted to basically ask myself: why? Just why. Why do I write? Why was my sister silent? Why was my father silent? Why did they kill themselves? Why do I not kill myself? Why?”
Now 61, Toews (rhymes with saves) is one of Canada’s foremost writers. She speaks from her home in Toronto, where she lives with her partner, mother, grown-up daughter and grandchildren. (Toews also has a son, Owen. Both he and her daughter, Georgia, are authors.)
RM Block
“There are four generations of us here,” she says, explaining that she and her partner live in a separate “laneway house”, while the others live in the “big house”. Toews does most of her writing in a “tiny little room upstairs”.
She has authored eight novels, including the Dublin Literary Award-nominated A Complicated Kindness (2004), All My Puny Sorrows , Women Talking and Fight Night. She has also published one work of non-fiction written in her father’s voice (Swing Low: A Life) and had several works adapted for screen, most notably Women Talking (her novelisation of events that occurred in a Bolivian Mennonite community where more than a hundred girls and women were raped in their sleep), which was adapted by Sarah Polley into an Oscar-winning film starring Rooney Mara, Claire Foy and Jessie Buckley.
“I love the film, it’s beautiful, but at the same time it was that whole Hollywood experience,” she says.
What does she mean by “Hollywood experience”?
“I mean ... I don’t want to ... you know, everybody involved in the movie was great, they did such a great job – it’s just that Hollywood, naked, clamouring, striving for attention, for fame; the whole idolising celebrity, and then the whole money part of it ... The fact that Women Talking was even made – a film like that, based on a book like that – was just remarkable.”
Toews is warm, open, unassuming. Even across the screen, she emanates such loveliness that a conversation with her leaves you feeling slightly high. Her smiling, youthful face betrays nothing of the long, eventful life she has lived. Born in 1964, she was raised in a Mennonite community in Steinbach, Manitoba (Mennonites, not unlike the Amish, are a group of Anabaptist Christians, who live at a remove from mainstream society). Her fiction has drawn heavily on her life.Her experience as a young single mother fed into Summer of My Amazing Luck, which explores a friendship between two single mothers in a public housing complex. Her work has also depicted sisterly bonds, mental health struggles, intergenerational families, film crews (a leading role in the film Silent Light inspired her fifth novel, Irma Voth, about a Mennonite woman who is ostracised by her community and joins a film crew) and the experiences of women in Mennonite communities or otherwise.
She describes her upbringing as “a lot of fun”.
“I had a great childhood as far as I know – maybe I would need some deep therapy or psychoanalysis to dig it up – but seriously [it was great], up until I was about 12 or 13.”
Then she started noticing how stifling her environment was.
“It was a very conservative Mennonite community. Higher education, certainly, was something that people were suspicious of. When my sister decided that she was going to go to university, the elders of the church came to talk with my parents and say: this is not a good idea.”
But her family was “something of an anomaly”, in that both of her parents were educated with graduate degrees and encouraged their daughters to “express ourselves, to read, to question – combined with attending church and playing by the rules”.
Rebellion was “sort of silently encouraged”, especially by Toews’s mother, who would later end up leaving the community but not until her husband died.
Toews, meanwhile, in her teenage years started “rebelling and asking questions and thinking that I really wanted to get out of there”.
Aged 18 she headed off with a boyfriend and a bicycle and landed in Belfast in 1982.
“We assembled our bikes there at the airport and then we took off around Northern Ireland, around the Antrim Coast. We were so – I still am – in love with Ireland. Enamoured with the history, with the literature, with the poetry, everything. There we were, these two stupid kids, pretentious as f**k, and they were just like: what are you doing here? We have a bit of a thing going on. It’s not really a good time to be cycling around Northern Ireland.”
But there was something about the place that spoke to her.
“This is sort of embarrassing but coming from this sort of oppressive, repressive Mennonite community ... I think we somehow related to the struggle to break away from that kind of control, that authority. Bobby Sands seemed to be a romantic figure to us – his convictions, his ideology, his strength, his bravery. He was good looking. We were young. We didn’t experience the brutality of it, the horror of it. We were naive.”
During this time she made a strange pact with her sister. Marjorie, suffering with depression, had left university and moved back in with their parents. Toews promised to keep writing letters to her as long as she agreed not to kill herself.
“Obviously, in hindsight, it’s a ridiculous pact,” says Toews. “Me writing letters isn’t going to keep her alive – nothing’s going to keep her alive if she decides that she doesn’t want to be alive ... But I took it seriously. I needed to write. There was an urgency. It didn’t even occur to me at the time, when I was writing the letters, that I was creating a story of our trip and the characters and the setting – all of that – but that was the beginning. She was the one who got me to write.”
These letters, dating to the late 1990s, are collected and form part of A Truce That Is Not Peace. Toews writes to her sister of her travels, her relationship troubles, her apprehension about her first novel coming out (Summer of My Amazing Luck was published in 1996).
More broadly, the form of the book is hard to describe, yet ingenious. As at a visual art exhibition, disparate elements – quotes from other authors, stories and memories from Toews’s life, reflections on language and its limits – come together to make a coherent whole. An imagined “Wind Museum”, comprising wind-based information and installations, is a unifying thread.
“I’ve had this idea since I was a kid, but it was a rain museum I wanted to create. That sort of morphed into a wind museum for the book. And the impossibility of containing winds in a museum sort of acts as a metaphor for writing. Like how can we actually contain all of this stuff in a book, on the page? We can’t, but we keep trying.”
As with much of Toews’s work, the book is shot through with dark comedy. Her mother, who features as an indomitable central figure, “laughed, and laughed, and laughed” when she read it.
“She said: it’s all true. And I said: yeah, mom, it’s non-fiction.”
Even for Toews, who wrote it, the book is a bit of a mystery.
“I really need to actually come up with a better answer in terms of what this book is about, because to me, it’s unlike any of the other books that I’ve ever written,” she says. “It’s sort of like: how did this materialise? It was almost like some other version of me just slipped out and did that. And now I’m left with this thing, and I’m like, Oh. Who did this? When? Why?”
A Truce That Is Not Peace by Miriam Toews is published by 4th Estate
