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

WARNING: This story contains details of suicide. 

In A Truce That Is Not Peace, acclaimed Canadian author Miriam Toews grapples directly with the losses of her father and sister to suicide. 

While her earlier works have explored these tragedies from different angles — Swing Low told her father’s story in his voice, and All My Puny Sorrows was a novel inspired by her bond with her sister — this new book is the first in which she details her own experience. 

“Their suicides … it’s the thing I’m forever now, for the rest of my life, attempting to understand,” Toews told The Current‘s host Matt Galloway. 

Toews’ father, Melvin Toews, was a respected elementary school teacher in Steinbach, Man., who battled bipolar disorder. In 1998, he took his own life.

Then 12 years later, in 2010, Toews’ older sister Marjorie died by suicide as well, after struggling with severe depression. 

According to Toews, the book is a kind of internal confrontation. It’s an “argument” with herself, as she tries to make peace with her loved ones’ decisions.

“It’s different than compassion,” she said. “It’s to say, ‘I respect your choice,’ ‘You were in so much pain, you needed to find a way of ending it, and this was what you decided would end the pain.'”

In A Truce That Is Not Peace, Toews weaves together short snippets of her everyday life that are told with vulnerability and honesty. She shifts and reflects on the different eras of her life thus far throughout the book — childhood, parenthood and now grandparenthood — as she tries to get to a place where she can “really feel absolute respect” for the way her sister and father chose to end their lives. 

Toews is the author of several books, including A Complicated Kindness, Fight Night and Summer of My Amazing Luck. Her work has earned numerous awards, including the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction, the Writers’ Trust Engel Findley Award and the Atwood Gibson Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize.

She’s also the author of Women Talking, which was adapted into an Academy-award winning film directed by Sarah Polley. 

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

Sister and daughter  

A Truce That Is Not Peace outlines what her relationships with her father and sister were like through the memories that she shares.  

In one part, Toews recalls a summer picnic in 1977: hamburgers and potato salad, kids screaming under sprinklers and the happiness of making her father react to a joke she told.

“You could feel it in your heart, feel the joy — the physical sensation — of making your dad smile,” Toews wrote. 

Her awe for her sister Marjorie is also palpable on the page.  

In one scene, a young Miriam lies in bed pretending to sleep, as she secretly watches her sister do her hair and grab her textbooks with effortless grace. 

Toews then asks herself: “Do you recall any time in your life — or every time in your life — when you picked up a textbook, when you tried to make it seem natural … but you couldn’t do it the way your sister did it?” 

WATCH | Why Miriam Toews still hesitates to say she’s a writer:

Why Miriam Toews is still ‘mortified’ to call herself a writer

The celebrated author talks with host Matt Galloway about why she still feels like an imposter. Her new memoir, A Truce that is Not Peace, dives into her thorny relationship with writing.  

Toews told Galloway her father was the one who first encouraged her to write. He prompted her to “write a little bit” whenever she was bored. 

“I remember it feeling good,” she said. “The process, just putting words onto a page … it was exciting to see that I’d made something.” 

Her sister, too, shaped her writing voice, says Toews. When Marjorie, 24, returned home from university “very sick” and depressed, she begged Miriam — then 18 and newly traveling in Europe — to send her letters.

Toews says she took the task “very seriously,” and it took her writing to another level. 

“I was conscious of the things of writing — the setting, where were we, who were we talking to, trying to get in all those details, trying to really paint a picture for her,” she said. 

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

“I was always, always a million miles away in my head, rearranging words, long dark sentences on white pages,” she wrote.  

‘A type of truce’ 

Toews says she also descended into a “really dark time” during a particularly difficult period in her life after losing her father. She says she once stood by the Assiniboine River many years ago, contemplating suicide herself. 

“Everything seemed to be falling apart,” she said. “My marriage was ending, my sister was so sick … maybe I was attempting to get closer to my father.”

But when her sister died, something shifted. Though devastating, the loss also brought her remaining family — who were living apart in Winnipeg and Toronto at the time — closer together, she says. 

“My mom and I were on the phone and almost simultaneously said, ‘OK, now we need to circle the wagons and be together,'” said Toews. 

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

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

When asked why she chose to write the book now, Toews says it was her way of also answering a question she’s often confronted with as an author: “Why do you write?” 

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

And by the time she finished writing, Toews says she had arrived at something — a realization that ultimately gave the book its title.

“There’s no sense of peace of mind, or closure, or anything like that. I don’t believe in those things anymore” she said. “But it certainly was a type of truce.”

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