A Truce That Is Not Peace

"I’m always skeptical when critics say a book about heavy stuff is darkly funny, but Miriam Toews’ memoir about the deaths by suicide of her father and sister 12 years apart really is both very serious and laugh-out-loud funny. This tribute to her only sibling – and to her stalwart mother, who shares her morbid sense of humor – is a tender meditation on writing and silence that ponders the question, “If silence says more, why write?” Clearly, like laughter, writing is a powerful coping mechanism for the talented Toews."

"It’s so different. It’s fragmentary, told not in chapters but in a way that’s unexpected. We jump all over time and place. We’re in different forms. We’re in letters, in emails, we’re taking walks with the narrator as she meets up with people. It opens with a question that the author is asked, and which she asks herself throughout the book, which is: Why do I write? I guess for people who are writers, that’s why it’s so appealing. We people on the NBCC board are interested in the same question. But it is also about loss. The writer is meditating on the loss of her father and sister to suicide. I was deeply engaged in what this writer was doing on the page—how she took fragments and put them together. Because it didn’t feel like a fragmentary reading experience, it felt very cohesive. It came back to the question again and again: Why do I write? Why does anybody write? Why should one right? There is humour, but there’s all kinds of thinking and revealing and considering of what it means to write memoir, and what it means to write about memory and experience. I loved it. I mean, I loved them all. Any one of the books on the shortlist could have won, and I would have been 100% behind it."