Canadian novelist Miriam Toews has suffered tremendous loss. Now she’s telling her story

WARNING: This story contains suicide details.

In A truce that is not peaceThe acclaimed Canadian author Miriam Toews fights directly with the losses of her father and sister to suicide.

While their previous works have explored these tragedies from different angles – Swing told his father’s story in his voice and All my insignificant gears She was a novel inspired by her bond with her sister: this new book is the first in which she details her own experience.

“His suicides … is what I am forever, for the rest of my life, trying to understand,” Toews told The currentThe host Matt Galloway.

Toews’s father, Melvin Toews, was a respected primary school teacher at Steinbach, Man., Who fought against bipolar disorder. In 1998, he took his life.

Then, 12 years later, in 2010, Toews older sister, Marjorie, also died for suicide, after fighting with severe depression.

According to Toews, the book is a kind of internal confrontation. It is an “argument” with yourself, since you try to make peace with the decisions of your loved ones.

“It’s different from compassion,” he said. “That is: ‘I respect your choice’, ‘you had so much pain that you needed to find a way to finish it, and this was what you decided that the pain would end.'”

In TO Truce that is not peaceToews wears short fragments of your daily life that have vulnerability and honesty. She changes and reflects on the different times of her life so far throughout the book: childhood, paternity and now the grandmother, while trying to reach a place where she can “really feel absolute respect” because of the way her sister and her father chose to finish their lives.

Toews is the author of several books, including A complicated goodness, Fight night and Summer of my incredible luck. His work has won numerous awards, including the Literary Prize of the Governor General for Fiction, the Prize of Trust of the Enngel Findley writers and the Trust fiction award of the ATWOOD Gibson writers.

She is also the author of Women speakingwhich adapted to a film winner of the Academy award led by Sarah Polley.

Toews was appointed for the order of Canada in 2025 for “his unique ability to portray very human stories of overcoming adversity and finding meaning.”

Sister and daughter

TO Truce that is not peace He describes how her relationships with her father and sister were through the memories she shares.

In one part, Toews remembers a summer picnic in 1977: hamburgers and potato salad, children shouting under sprinklers and the happiness of making his father react to a joke that told him.

“You could feel it in your heart, feel the joy, physical feeling, to smile at your dad,” Toews wrote.

His astonishment for his sister Marjorie is also palpable on the page.

In a scene, a young Miriam lies in bed pretending to sleep, while secretly look at her sister peeving down and grab her textbooks with grace effortlessly.

Toews then wonders: “Do you remember at some point in your life, or every time of your life, when you collected a textbook, when you tried to seem natural … but you couldn’t do it in the way your sister did?”

Look | Why Miriam Toews still doubts that she is a writer:

Why Miriam Toews is still ‘mortified’ to be called a writer

The famous author talks to host Matt Galloway about why he still feels like an imposture. His new memory, a truce that is not peace, is immersed in his thorny relationship with writing.

Toews told Galloway that her father was the one who first encouraged her to write. He invited her to “write a little” every time she was bored.

“I remember that I felt good,” he said. “The process, just putting words on a page … It was exciting to see what had done something.”

His sister also shaped his writing voice, says Toews. When Marjorie, 24, returned home from the “Very sick” University and depressed, begged Miriam, then 18 and recently traveling to Europe, to send his letters.

Toews says he took the “very seriously” task, and his writing led him to another level.

“He was aware of the things to write: the stage, where were we, who were we talking with, trying to enter all those details, trying to really paint an image,” he said?

Toews reveals in the book that is her identity as a writer who has remained constant despite all the other different changes in her life.

“I was always, always one million miles away in my head, reorganizing words, long dark prayers on white pages,” he wrote.

‘A type of truce’

Toews says he also descended to a “really dark time” for a particularly difficult period in his life after losing his father. She says that once she was next to the Assiniboine River many years ago, contemplating suicide to herself.

“Everything seemed to be collapsed,” he said. “My marriage was finishing, my sister was so sick … Maybe I was trying to approach my father.”

But when his sister died, something changed. Although devastating, the loss also brought to his remaining family, who lived separately in Winnipeg and Toronto at that time, closer, she says.

“My mother and I were talking on the phone and almost simultaneously we said: ‘Ok, now we need to surround the cars and be together,'” said Toews.

Today, that family unit remains firmly united, she says. While his son and his family still live in Winnipeg, Toews shares his life in Toronto with his mother, daughter, partner and grandchildren.

“For me, it’s the best in the world,” said Toews.

When asked why he chose to write the book now, Toews says it was also his way of answering a question that he often faces as an author: “Why do you write? ”

“Non fiction seemed the best container for that,” he said. “Just using my life in an attempt to answer that question.”

And when he finished writing, Toews says he had reached something, an understanding that finally gave the book his title.

“There is no sense of mental peace, or closing, or anything like that. I no longer believe in those things,” he said. “But it was certainly a type of truce.”

If you or someone you know are fighting, this is where to look for help: