A Truce That Is Not Peace

By: Miriam Toews

Narrated by: Miriam Toews

"Essential reading. A companion for turbulent times." -Laura van den Berg

Internationally bestselling author Miriam Toews' memoir of the will to write-a work of disobedient memory, humor, and exquisite craft set against a content-hungry, prose-stuffed society.

“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 listeners, 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.

©2025 Miriam Toews (P)2025 Recorded Books

Unexpectedly Uplifting

This was an Unexpectedly Uplifting read. The author leads us toward acceptance and understanding of a loved one who commits suicide supplying words, offering space, demonstrating the relationship between silence and voice. The book is both hilarious and gentle, and tho this memoir is my first experience with the author I will be reading more of her work.

The blandness of the prose. The repetition of the phrases

I’m sorry that I found this unlistenable. I like a good story. Could not finish this one. I’m sure the author worked very hard to bring it forth. The voice of the character and the reader did not engage me.