Long before she became one of Canada’s most celebrated authors, Miriam Toews was an 18-year-old with a restless streak, set on fleeing the strictures of her conservative Mennonite community. Toews’s family descended from Russian Mennonites and spoke Plautdietsch, an unwritten language. They grew up in a world with little privacy, many unofficial rules and the threat of excommunication. Toews and a boyfriend had planned a bike trip across Europe, one in which they would sit on the grave of John Keats and smoke too many cigarettes.
Before she left, her older sister Marj asked a favor: would Toews write letters to her while she was away? Marj, then 24, had recently moved back home and was in a period of deep depression. She had stopped talking, but she would still write. “She was so sick,” says Toews, sitting across from me at a picnic table in Toronto’s Trinity Bellwoods park.
Toews began writing to her sister, partly because she loved talking to her and partly because she hoped it would save her life. “Which, of course, is a ridiculous idea,” says Toews. “That me writing letters would keep her alive. But I really took it seriously.”
Anyone with a formidable older sister knows their unrivaled power. They are a portal to the wider world, brave in their primacy. Marj Toews was one such older sister. She was six years older than Miriam, who worshipped her from day one. “She was so much the subject of my investigation into this world,” Toews tells me. “I needed her. Who she was to me was something so necessary.”
Marj has never stopped being a subject of necessary investigation for Miriam Toews: both her remarkable life, and her death by suicide at the age of 52. Since that European excursion with her ex-boyfriend, Toews has authored 10 books, one of which, Women Talking, was adapted into an Oscar-winning film starring Frances McDormand and Rooney Mara. Her latest, A Truce That Is Not Peace, was released on Tuesday and is her first memoir written from her perspective. (Her first work of nonfiction, Swing Low, was written in the voice of her father).
Toews is also an enthusiastic grandmother of four. She lives near downtown Toronto, with her 90-year old mother, Elvira; her partner; and her daughter Georgia’s family, including their two young sons.
When Toews and I first encounter each other, a snaking line of hand-holding toddlers in fluorescent safety vests are weaving their way into the park. A smiling Toews stands vigil as they pass, trying to spot her grandson in the mix. It’s a muggy morning, and we, like the children, are in search of shade.
At 61, Toews is older now than her older sister ever was, and around the same age her father was when he too died of suicide. Melvin Toews was a beloved schoolteacher in their home town of Steinbach in the Manitoba province of central Canada. He was a deeply devout man, a proud champion of his daughters and his wife, and somebody who experienced bipolar disorder his entire life. “My dad sort of had to be mentally ill in secret in that community,” says Toews. There was the danger of it being misinterpreted as a lack of faith. “If your faith was stronger, if you were a better Mennonite, you wouldn’t be depressed,” she says. His illness sometimes brought him into sustained periods of silence. The whole first year after Toews was born, he did not speak.
It makes sense that though we are ostensibly here to talk about A Truce That Is Not Peace, our conversation stays mostly with both of them: the complexity of their deaths and the totality of how much they are missed. No matter how much time has passed, their absence is still raw. Becoming a grandmother has only intensified this feeling: Toews cannot help but think about how much Marj would have enjoyed this next stage of caregiving. Toews’s work is often centered on the question of why her father and her sister both chose to end their lives, and in A Truce That Is Not Peace, she acknowledges that she will never find the answer. It is that very paradox that keeps her on the page, turning it over again to try to understand them as they wished to be understood, and to stay close to them now that they are gone.
When she wrote the book, Toews had just turned 60. She was tending to both her young grandchildren and her elderly mother, whom she has previously called the love of her life. (Elvira Toews, a Lamborghini-loving, Toronto Blue Jays fan who bucked tradition to go to graduate school and become a social worker, leaps off the page in so many of Toews’s books. She is the kind of woman who eats a daily bowl of vanilla ice-cream with chocolate syrup, banana slices and walnuts, and when it’s over says: “How ’bout another one?”)
Miriam Toews was already one of Canada’s bestselling authors, but the success of Women Talking launched her into a new level of international recognition, winning all of Canada’s top literary prizes and plaudits from everyone from Margaret Atwood to Brad Pitt, who was a co-producer on the film adaptation. Yet, she could not shake the feeling that her need to continue to write was somehow newly shameful.
“I was grappling with the urgency of it,” says Toews in regards to her writing, “And on the other hand the mortification. Why do I still need to write? Why do I still need to make this thing in order to connect with other human beings so I don’t feel so alone and weird? It’s so embarrassing.” She asked herself: hadn’t she said it all? What was left in her life to mine? Her nine previous books had already reflected back on many of her own experiences. Maybe it was time to finally heed the message she had received all those early years from her Mennonite forefathers: keep quiet.
That would be dignified, Toews insisted. “I just wish I could be like a calm, serene, bemused grandmotherly person with wisdom,” says Toews. “But it seems as though – it seems like I haven’t really achieved that. And I have to understand that I never will.”
At some point, we had to stop to laugh: it seemed too wonderfully Toewsian that while she was talking about the indignity of an older female writer still expressing herself, we were surrounded by individuals who were contorting themselves into strange, acrobatic shapes. One was a shirtless man bending over a park bench like a stretchy rainbow, the other dangling frog-legged and upside down from a fabric sling strung up in a tree. “God,” says Toews. “It’s so perfect.”
This time around, Toews is changing the way she tells these stories. Most of her previous books contain autobiographical information told through the prism of fiction. A Truce That Is Not Peace takes an inverse approach. The central conceit is a fictional prompt from a fictional conference in Mexico City, a send-up of the highfalutin literary circles Toews now finds herself in. The idea is something like this: organizers of this “Conversación” want her to provide an answer for why she writes. She sends them many attempts: associative, rangy, exasperated, rueful, funny ruminations on the futility of writing. Eventually, the committee uninvites her.
The book is in many ways about the inherent failures of language. Marj Toews, like her father Melv before her, would fall into long periods of silence in her suffering. A Truce That Is Not Peace is constantly weighing Toews’s own urgent need to write against her sister’s and her father’s choice to periodically forsake words altogether. “Silence. Suicide. Writing. Within all of these, we are holding,” writes Toews. “Does her silence hold the perfect expression of her suffering? Is her silence a communications success, my writing a failure?”
Silence, suicide and writing: these are sisters of sorts in Toews’s questioning mind: “Are writing and suicide related?” she asks. “The same thing? Or estranged relatives, at least? Angry siblings whose origins are the same. An attempt – a fragment of an attempt – to save life, preserve life, to freeze it in a moment, to end what is real, to survive by ending. To preserve, in silence, what is authentic.”
Yet Toews is not cynical about the project of writing. It is nothing short of a choice to keep on living, long after we have buried our beloved dead. “Why must I draw a comparison between writing and suicide?” asks Toews. “To stay with her. To stay with them. Yes, you can imagine my suffering. Yeah, you fucking can. Try! Stay with me.”
Despite their serious subject matter, Toews’s books have a rallying spirit to them, an angry jolt of energy that comes from a perpetual spirit of adolescent rebellion. In A Truce That Is Not Peace, that looseness feels more radical in nature, entirely liberated from plot. Toews has a deep distrust of narrative’s more controlling impulses.
Perhaps it is because Toews has always been sensitive to modes of control, from the strict traditional Mennonite orthodoxy she grew up under. Or maybe it is because of the way some people in her religious community rushed to come up with neat and inaccurate explanations for why her father had died by suicide, which hurt Toews more than it provided comfort.
Or maybe it was the new experience of having her novel about survivors of gas-facilitated sexual assault be made into a feature film and fully absorbed into the alienating awards cycle machine. “The reality is that [director] Sarah Polley did an amazing job,” says Toews. “We talked about it throughout, she was so sensitive to the whole thing, and it was an amazing experience.” The irony was not lost on Toews that going to Hollywood meant losing her authorial voice on a novel that was literally just women talking to one another. A Truce That Is Not Peace’s nonlinear structure makes it immune to such dangers. “I was thinking, OK, there’s no way this is going to be adapted,” laughs Toews. “Like, adapt this, motherfuckers. Just try.”
There is of course a complicated answer to why write, and then there’s a simple one. “Why do I write?” writes Toews matter-of-factly towards the end of A Truce That Is Not Peace. “Because she asked me to.” Marj and Mel Toews introduced her to the world of books, a world that Toews thinks saved her life. “I love them and I miss them so much,” says Toews. “My sister, my God. It’s a visceral pain and it never goes away. It lessens, it lightens, it ebbs and flows.”
It’s hard to overstate the patriarchal conditions Marj and Miriam Toews’s family were all subject to. Many of the women they grew up with lived hard lives. Their grandmother – their mother’s mother – buried six of her 13 children in infancy. Their father’s mother often cried out in her sleep, speaking the name of a group of men she grew up with in a little girl’s voice. She stole and drank bottles of vanilla extract during the day, lining her purse with a tea towel so that the glass would not make a sound. When Marj was 10, she was abducted off the street by a group of teenage boys in a car who dropped her off in front of her house hours later “doused with a vile brown liquid”. “Don’t be alarmed if I scream in my sleep,” Toews’s own mother cheerfully sometimes tells her family.
But the women they grew up with also had a deep communion with one another that was borne out of the intense gender separation they experienced. They sang together. They raised their families alongside one another. And they laughed – a lot. “With my mother, with my aunts, with my female cousins, there was a subversive humor that we could all rally around and share. It was always against our oppressors, the rules that were put on us,” says Toews.
Nobody made her laugh harder than Marj. “She was so funny,” says Toews. And what was it that made them laugh so hard? “That shared thing,” says Toews smiling, in the sly knowing language of sisters, “whatever that shared thing is.”
A shared sense of humor is an underwater cable that connects so many siblings and so many of Toews’s books. It’s the language of subterfuge. What better way is there to chip away at an unreasonably sanctimonious authority than to laugh at it? Toews tells me that when she gave A Truce That Is Not Peace to her mother to read, her mother laughed and laughed, telling Toews: “It’s all true!”
I ask Toews whether she dreams about Marj. “I do,” she tells me. “The details are often the same. She’s always telling me she’s OK. And she’s always looking good and happy. I would like to have that dream every night. Every night. It’s always a little bit hard waking up. But it’s always good to have the dream.”
A Truce That Is Not Peace is dedicated to Marj. It contains some of those old letters between the two of them, back when Miriam was 18 and left for her overseas biking trip. Only one is written by Marj. It ends with her saying: “I very much miss being able to call you anytime or just come over + hang out. A sister’s place is in many ways even better than a friend’s – you’re always welcome, don’t have to make arrangements etc. etc. Can stay long or short, clean out the fridge, read the paper etc In short, not be on one’s best behaviour.”
Toews’s writing is a way of building a suspended sister’s place where the correspondence is ongoing. It’s a place to go to not be on one’s best behavior. It’s both the dream and the waking up. “She taught me how to stay alive,” writes Toews. “Silence and words: both are good, both are failures, both are efforts, and in that effort is where life lies – not lies, but maybe it does – but where it exists. And the fragments in between are the spaces where she and I meet.”
• In the US, you can call or text the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline at 988 or chat at 988lifeline.org. In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org
