I harbour a certain prejudice against writing memoirs. I find the genre keen to emphasise that a writer’s life is full of suffering, and that it therefore must necessarily be of great service to others. If I chose to bang my head against a brick wall every day, I would not extrapolate any automatic benefit to my fellow man. Miriam Toews, the Canadian author of eight bestselling novels and one work of nonfiction, has chosen a rather less cloying modus operandi in this new entry to the catalogue.
Her previous memoir, Swing Low: A Life, published 12 years ago, told the story of her father’s manic depression through his perspective. Now A Truce That Is Not Peace interrogates the ethics of this approach. “Was writing in the voice of my father an act of compassion?” she asks. “Or born of an urgent need to know why and how, a creative act from a deep, dark hole […] Literature is not compassion; it’s war.”
This declaration could risk sounding sententious were it not interwoven with Toews’s stout sense of humour. “My six-year-old granddaughter characterises my writing process this way,” she writes – the italics appeasing readers as sceptical as I am of authorial preciousness, the reference to a granddaughter a welcome change for anyone feeling grumpy at the publishing industry’s obsession with youth. I tend to view these matters additively rather than subtractively: instead of complaining about books you’re not interested in, why not support the ones you want to see more of? On that note, you could do worse than A Truce that Is Not Peace if you want to read a memoir from someone who isn’t approximately 12 years old.
[ Miriam Toews: ‘It’s unlike any of the other books that I’ve ever written’ ]
Toews structures her examination of writing, memory and psychology around a prompt posed by an upcoming conference in Mexico City: “Why do I write?” Sooner or later we all tackle that question directly, from George Orwell to Joan Didion. This isn’t the sort of book you can spoil, so I’ll tell you the answer fair and square: Toews claims no blazing social purpose. “Because [my sister] asked me to” is one of her responses: “[She] punctuated her life with long periods of silence. It was during these periods that she begged me to write her letters – about anything, my life, the days – and in that asking was an offering. She taught me how to stay alive.”
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This second cathartic survival purpose of writing reverberates through Toews’s formal decisions. A 12-page passage is structured around therapeutic questions – “Do you ever think of harming yourself? Do you have a plan? A considered method?” – that elicit fragmented memories and sharp self-scrutiny. But trauma-dumping this is not.
Toews can let go when she wants to, then reel it back. “How will it work, my Wind Museum?” begins the next whimsical passage. “Will people move from room to room, or gallery to gallery, experiencing different types of wind?” This deceptively seamless artistic control will undoubtedly be misread as “raw” in some quarters. But compare Toews’s well-judged craft to an actual therapy diary and you’ll see the difference.
She never forgets that language is a consciously manipulable tool, though Orwell himself preached that the mechanics of good prose should be invisible to the reader. Her parents are from a Mennonite community and speak Plautdietsch, or Mennonite Low German – “a spoken language, not a written one”. Plugging away at Duolingo Spanish to prepare for the Mexico conference, she wryly juxtaposes the low-hanging fruit you’re expected to learn in a new language before getting to the things you actually want to say: “Yo como manzanas” (I eat apples) as opposed to “No puedo respirar” (I can’t breathe).
Given this fine-tuned centrality of words, it’s a shame the editing and proofreading let Toews down. She claims Sligo is pronounced “Slago”, and I counted three typographical mistakes in the snippets of Spanish and German within a 176-page book. It’s unfair to place the blame on authors alone when this happens, as it often does in anglophone publishing: typos in any language become invisible to you when you’ve gone over a manuscript dozens of times. Publishers should invest the same resources in checking errors in other languages that they do in English.
What will stay with me more abidingly, though, is Toews’s accumulation of well-chosen details. “In my town, when I was young, every home had a Daily Devotional calendar […] They weren’t wall calendars; they were in the shape of small boxes and sat smugly on counters and tabletops,” she writes, moving elegantly from an abstract anthropological observation to an object you can see and feel. A former apartment building had “tiny doors on our bigger doors […] the size and shape of a Penguin Classic”.
What an enjoyable mind to spend time roaming through. The Mexico City conference drops Toews in the end, but she’s welcome on our bookshelves instead.
