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 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 that 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.