Note: This conversation was recorded in September 2025 and has been edited for time. It is a conversation that contains explicit references to suicide. If you or someone you love is struggling with a mental health crisis or in immediate danger, please call or text 988 to reach the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline.
This week on The Write Question, host Lauren Korn speaks with Miriam Toews, author of the memoir A Truce That Is Not Peace (Bloomsbury Publishing). Miriam is best known as a novelist, and Truce is technically her first book of non-fiction (Swing Low, written over twenty years ago, is a book about her father told from his perspective; that is, it is a book of non-fiction, written from a fictionalized perspective).
About the book:
“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 non-fiction, 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.
“All of my writing, I’m writing to and for my father and my sister.”
About Miriam:
Miriam Toews is the author of the bestselling novels All My Puny Sorrows, Summer of My Amazing Luck, A Boy of Good Breeding, A Complicated Kindness, The Flying Troutmans, Irma Voth, Fight Night, and two works of non-fiction, Swing Low: A Life and A Truce That Is Not Peace. She is winner of the Governor General’s Award for Fiction, the Libris Award for Fiction Book of the Year, the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, and the Writers’ Trust Engel/Findley Award. She lives in Toronto.
Mentioned in this episode:
Swing Low: A Life and All My Puny Sorrows by Miriam Toews (Bloomsbury Publishing)
Miriam Toews recommends:
Housekeeping by Marilyn Robinson (Picador)
Distant Star by Roberto Bolaño, translated by Chris Andrews (Picador)
By Night in Chile by Roberto Bolaño, translated by Chris Andrews (Picador)
The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative by Vivian Gornick (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Moments of Being by Virginia Woolf (Mariner Books)
Septology by Jon Fosse, translated by Damion Searls (Transit Books)
Writing by Marguerite Duras, translated by by Mark Polizzotti (University of Minnesota Press)
The Mystery of Perception: A Conversation with Lynne Tillman by Taylor Lewandowski (Archway Editions)
Clowns: In Conversation with Modern Masters by Ezra Lebank and David Bridel (Routledge)
Lauren Korn recommends:
A Truce That Is Not Peace, Fight Night, Women Talking, and All My Puny Sorrows by Miriam Toews (Bloomsbury Publishing)
“Soft Tissue: Thoughts on Miriam Toews’s Women Talking” by Amie Souza Reilly in The Adroit Journal
How to Write an Autobiographical Novel: Essays by Alexander Chee (Mariner Books)
In the Dream House: A Memoir by Carmen Maria Machado (Graywolf Press); listen to Lauren’s conversation with Carmen here!
Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir by D. J. Waldie (W. W. Norton & Company)
Bluets (Wave Poetry) and The Argonauts (Graywolf Press) by Maggie Nelson
The Crying Book (Catapult Books) and In the Rhododendrons: A Memoir with Appearances by Virginia Woolf (Algonquin Books) by Heather Christle
Biography of X (Picador) and The Möbius Book (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) by Catherine Lacey
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The Write Question team for this episode was Lauren Korn, host, co-producer, and editor; and Chris Moyles, co-producer, editor, and sound engineer. This episode is supported by Fact & Fiction, an independent bookstore located in the heart of downtown Missoula, Montana, providing books for all ages and supporting the literary community in Montana and beyond. More information can be found at factandfictionbooks.com.
The Write Question logo and brand (2022) was designed by Molly Russell. You can see more of her work at iamthemollruss.com and on Instagram @iamthemollruss.
Funding for The Write Question comes from Humanities Montana; members of Montana Public Radio; and from the Greater Montana Foundation—encouraging communication on issues, trends, and values of importance to Montanans.
The Write Question is a production of Montana Public Radio.
