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In this breathtaking memoir of stunning emotional force and electrifying honesty, one of Canada's most iconic writers tells her own story for the first time. "Why does Miriam Toews write? A Truce That Is Not Peace answers the question in a hundred ways, all of them original, autobiographical, deeply painful, funny, oblique, confounding � just as those of us who believe her to be one of the greatest living North American writers have come to expect. A Truce That Is Not Peace is the best memoir you will read all year." Nick Hornby, author of High Fidelity �Why do you write?� the organizer of a literary event in Mexico City asks Miriam Toews. Each attempt at an answer from Toews�all unsatisfactory to the organizer�surfaces new layers of grief, guilt, and futility connected to her sister�s suicide more than fifteen years ago. She has been keeping up, she realizes, an internal correspondence with her beloved sibling, attempting to fill a silence she can barely comprehend. As Toews turns to face that silence, we come to see that the question �why I write� is as impossible to answer as deciding whether to live life as a comedy or a tragedy. A masterwork of non-fiction, A Truce That Is Not Peace explores the uneasy pact every creative person makes with memory. Wildly original yet intimately, powerfully precise; momentous, hilarious, wrenching, and joyful�this is Miriam Toews at her dazzling best, remaking her personal world and inventing a brilliant literary form to hold it.