When young Miriam Toews landed a job as the “traffic reporter and weather girl” for a tiny radio station in Manitoba, her name --- Miriam, too biblical; and Toews, how do you pronounce that? --- was an immediate non-starter. So during her brief broadcast career, she was known as Lisa Cook.

But that was just a small obstacle for Toews (pronounced Taves) compared to the judgment and criticism she endured as a Canadian prairie Mennonite girl who wanted more than anything “to put words on paper” instead of settling for a life of domestic productivity, centered on church, children, food and homemaking.

In A TRUCE THAT IS NOT PEACE, Toews bends and twists the memoir genre into a strange yet often whimsical series of reflections on the age-old question “Why do you write?” Instead of posing it on her own behalf, however, she invents a realistic-sounding but wholly fictitious near-future literary conference in Mexico City, whose organizers use the question as a theme for invited authors to discuss.

"Those who open A TRUCE THAT IS NOT PEACE as their first encounter with [Toews] might be taken aback by its bold dissonance, but the best advice is to trust the process. There is a process and, magically, it works."

Throughout the book, Toews semantically parries with the invented conference organizers who become increasingly dissatisfied with her off-centered responses. She is not what they expect; often she is not what she expects either.

The conference deadline serves as an insistent metaphor for life itself, a never-ending series of aspirations, altered plans, expectations, crises and surprises that inform all of Toews’ fiction with a real-life urgency. In fact, the numerous instances in which interviewers have asked how her personal and family life influences her stories --- particularly their recurring themes of suicide and loss --- helped incubate A TRUCE THAT IS NOT PEACE.

In essence, this almost-memoir, which lacks the typical chronological continuity, evolving relationships and emotional resolutions, is “an argument with myself…confronting the big whys of writing,” Toews told a CBC Radio interviewer just this past week. But it also does something everyone can relate to in its unflinching exposure of the raw grief, incomprehension, guilt, anger and confusion that follow the loss of loved ones, especially those who choose to end their own lives.

Toews’ older sister and father, early supporters of her aspiration to be a writer, died by suicide, leaving her permanently bereft and tortured by recurring nightmares in which she herself would meet a grisly end. The “truce” Toews explained to her CBC interviewer is about finally arriving at a place in her life and literary art where “I can respect their choice to end their lives by suicide, without ever understanding it.”

As A TRUCE THAT IS NOT PEACE unfolds, we see glimpses of the author’s earlier life living rough and broke on a cycling adventure through Europe with a moody anarchist boyfriend, the traumatic dissolution of her marriage, the utter messiness of trying to raise children, her chaotic relationship with her mother, and the offbeat humor that comes with being a bad-influence grandmother.

Toews’ prose is as unpredictable and seemingly disorganized as the pictures she paints of her life: full-length letters, sprinklings of rare quotations, rambling but captivating dialogues in which the separate voices often coalesce into one, solitary musings, graphic imaginings, profane humor, the shapes of gestating poetry. Yet it all hangs together, sometimes with arresting strength, sometimes so precariously that you hold your breath.

Readers who already have delved into any of Toews’ eight novels --- among them FIGHT NIGHT, WOMEN TALKING and A COMPLICATED KINDNESS --- will go with the flow. Those who open A TRUCE THAT IS NOT PEACE as their first encounter with her might be taken aback by its bold dissonance, but the best advice is to trust the process. There is a process and, magically, it works.