The Question Every Writer Dreads

Miriam Toews’s narrative voice is deceptively casual until it lands blows with stupefying precision. Anyone who has struggled with suicidal ideation—whether their own or a loved one’s—will find in her work a compatriot, and not a complacent one. Her characters take on the essential questions of how to live with rage and with humor, with skull-splitting grief and irreverent, Gen X-era nihilism. To say that All My Puny Sorrows changed my life would not be an overstatement. It was a book I gave away so many times that, over the years, I must have bought half a dozen replacement copies. The same was true, almost a decade later, of her more recent novel Fight Night.

I read Toews’s newest book, A Truce That Is Not Peace, three times. In between, I revisited some of her earlier work, including A Complicated Kindness and Swing Low, an experimental memoir written in the voice of her father, who died by suicide, as did Toews’s sister. To read several Toews books back-to-back, I found, is to feel almost like a member of her family. One hears her life’s most moving and confounding stories told and retold, often in surprising ways to serve new points and purposes. One feels truth and fiction bend and blend. 

Truce is a brief, kaleidoscopic memoir, fewer than 180 pages long, with a narrative shape that is less arc than slinky, curling around and around the question, “Why do you write?” As Toews attempts to answer, becomes distracted from answering, and bluntly avoids answering that rather impossible question, the book suggests several theories almost in spite of its author. Why does she write? To vent her hideous spleen. Why does she write? To end the pain and preserve the truth. Why does she write? Because her books, though they are a poor substitute for self-mutilation and murder . . . absorb her rage like a gasoline-soaked rag. Why does she write? To go there with you. To go right to the very edge of the rail where you can smell the creosote, feel the limestone shale give way under your feet. Why does she write? Because her sister asked her to. 

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Rachel Lyon: In the book you mention that when you taught yourself to touch-type as a young kid, you started involuntarily typing all of the words around you with your fingers or the fingers in your mind. At the end of that anecdote, you write that you went to bed relieved: “I had typed away the day with the fingers in my mind as though that was the only way of proving to myself that I was alive, that what I was experiencing was real.” There’s an interesting authorial or narrative distance here. The person doing the recording is not really part of the scene. I see this speaking to the central concerns of the book: the faultiness of language, the dialectic between language and silence, the difficulty of narrative. 

MT: I hadn’t ever thought of that, but you’re right. The authorial distance, when I was typing in my mind, would have been from being on the outside a little bit, observing—although I was doing it even when I was actively involved in the scene itself. I would be typing what I was saying too. It’s an interesting idea, whether that was the beginning of writing, of becoming a writer.

RL: Writing as a practical or even embodied process, rather than a role.

MT: Exactly. It makes you think that we don’t have a choice in the matter. We write, to answer the central question of the book—if such a thing exists—because because; because I do; because I breathe; because I’m alive. I write because I’m writing. That’s just what’s happening.

It is a way to contain yourself, to disappear yourself. You’re taking yourself, taking everything that you’re feeling, experiencing, hearing, seeing, taking it all and writing it down. Whether it’s just in your mind or in a document, you’re putting it aside. It’s getting away from yourself.

RL: Moving it out of your body even as you’re doing it within your body.

MT: It is one of the things I think about when I think about the relationship, or the association, between writing and silence or suicide: that idea of disappearing yourself, getting away from yourself.

The domestic circumstances of one’s life determines the structure of their art.

RL: To just to stay, for a moment, with that idea of language and silence: There is a word from Robert Walser that comes up several times in the book, Prosastuckligeschaft.

MT: The prose-stuffed society.

RL: You include a few examples of language as junk, or filler, or meaningfully vacant but aesthetically pleasing. I was reminded of something you said when we last corresponded: you get bogged down in the idea that what you’re doing as a writer, with words, is ridiculous somehow, and that there are allusions to that thinking in all of your books. The futility of words. Do you feel as if you’ve gotten closer to that question with this book, or further away from it?

MT: I’m not sure. Maybe I’m in exactly the same place. Maybe I haven’t moved forward or backward. I just know that, as writers, what we struggle with is the limits of language; you do it anyway. For myself, I need to write, to live, to stay sane; I need to write because that’s what happens with my body, evidently. It moves towards writing. But I’m always aware of the cloud of futility or failure hanging over that.

If I put this word with this word, this word with this sentence with this pair—we can make ourselves crazy doing that. Call it perfectionism or whatever, ultimately, you write the thing down, you let it be, the book is finished, and you put it out there. But everything is perfect before I start writing. When it’s in my head I know what I’m writing, I know who I’m writing, I know who I’m writing to. And then you start and you’re suddenly confronted with your shortcomings. I’ve just come to accept that, to sort of reconcile myself with that. It’s an interesting conundrum, to be living in the idea of having to do something, but always with the knowledge that you’ll fail. Like Beckett said. 

RL: Try again. Fail again. Fail better. 

MT: I was doing a thing in some city, and this psychologist came up to me afterwards and started talking about a different writer. He was writing about language and babies and how infants don’t have language, yet are very capable of expressing themselves and their needs. When language is developed, that’s when we’re suddenly trapped. Twenty-six letters of the alphabet; this is the language that you have to express your humanity.

I didn’t write about this in the book, but my parents’ first language was an unwritten language—Mennonites whose first language this was Plautdietsch, low German, or whatever you want to call this medieval mishmash of languages. Yet there was documentation all along from the Mennonites, documents of life and record-keeping. That would have been done using a different language, High German probably. I just wonder, if you are a writer and the language that you have is an unwritten language, what do you do with that feeling, or that need? You may not even be able to fully comprehend that it’s a need or even articulate it back to yourself. If you don’t have the written language, then what do you do if you’re a writer? 

RL: I’m wondering about something that you mentioned in the book and elsewhere: that Yeats said life must be conceived as a tragedy in order to be lived. And meanwhile, there’s something sort of clownish and slapstick about the voice in your books generally—more particularly here in the letters that young Miriam sends to her sister. She writes “I want to be a clown. I think I am a clown . . . Maybe I was born a clown, and have to grow into my calling or something.” Lorrie Moore referred to it in her great article about Truce in The New York Review of Books as your “riffing, clowning voice.” What if the writer must conceive of life as a comedy in order to write it? 

MT: My take on that is that he meant, as long as you can resign yourself to the fact that life is suffering, as Buddhists say—this is something that I do—then you can start to see the other stuff, the absurdity, the irony, the comedy, and even the joy of life. Somebody like my mother, for instance, sees that life is essentially tragic, and for some reason that acute understanding is the thing that allows her to live. 

As far as comedy goes, I think clowns, or, at least, my kind of clown, the clown I think I am, or would like to be, is the kind of clown that can see it. Not the cliché of the sad clown. There’s something Lorrie Moore also said in her review, “the mournful harlequin at the forever wake.” They see it, they feel it, they get it. 

Stop, start, stop, start—that’s what it is to write. That’s what it is to examine something,

I was reading about Gertrude Stein and how so many people were so angry—men, of course—because she was funny. There was no way that she could be taken seriously if she was funny. But I see comedy as real. I take my comedy seriously! It’s another tool that we have, as writers, to tell a story—it’s not a relief, it’s not comic relief, it’s not a distraction. It’s going into the darkness, and staying there, just from a different angle. Those letters in the book that I was writing to my sister, I was really conscious of wanting to entertain her. Even as I was complaining about everything—I was an eighteen-year-old asshole, pretentious, and all the other things—I was fully engaged. I took my mission seriously. I really, really, really wanted to make her laugh.

RL: I notice we’re talking about these experiences and I’m not using this writerly phrase, “the speaker,” to refer to you, the letter writer; I’m saying “you.” Reading several of your books back to back, I had the experience of seeing characters in different incarnations and at different ages over the course of time. Nomi Nickel in A Complicated Kindness almost becomes Yoli in All My Puny Sorrows. Having written so much semi-autobiographical fiction, what was it like writing memoir? What were the differences in representing these characters fictionally and nonfictionally?

MT: There are differences. With fiction, first of all you have the freedom of embellishing. But also, this book is structured in a different way; it’s completely different from my novels which have a relatively standard structure with the arc. When you’re writing a novel you’re following a story that has to cohere, in a way. I want the structure of this new book to cohere as well. But it’s the structure—this kind of fragmented thing—that would just, necessarily, make it nonfiction, though I don’t know exactly why. I started writing it in the form that it is in, and then realized I wanted to write nonfiction. I wanted to use my life, my real life and the people and things in it. 

RL: I think you said this about Women Talking, too: that the form determines the book, that the form comes first. 

MT: Form, structure: it’s something I obsess over. As I’m reading, I’m always trying to understand how a writer structures their work. What do you like? How do you make that decision? What is the right structure for this story? Does that just come to us organically? It’s a little bit of both and trial and error. When I started writing, my kids were little, I didn’t have a lot of time to write, so it was just short little spurts, little blurts, fragmented. That’s all I had time for. It’s just my circumstances dictating the structure of the book. In this Gertrude Stein piece I was reading this morning, she was saying that, too. The domestic circumstances of one’s life determines the structure of their art.

RL: It does feel like a thing that gets overlooked in this notion of the great writer with all of the free time who sits at their desk all day long, and—

MT: and some servant, a woman, you know, brings some food and leaves it at the door and then quickly goes silently away, and doesn’t bother the great writer with anything.

RL: This topic of structure, and the central question, Why do you write? remind me of Swing Low, where, throughout the book, the narrative repeats, “Go back to the beginning,” and, “Write it all down.” I wonder about the idea of the refrain in this memoir—and in that book, which is almost a memoir. 

MT: It’s a very blatant reminder to myself of what it is that I’m doing, or attempting to do. It’s something that some editor—not the editor that I had, necessarily—might have suggested: Okay, we can take this out now, these markers, the repetitive refrain. But other people might see it as necessary, a Greek chorus. It is a way of getting going, a way of reminding myself of what it is that I’m attempting to do. Leaving it in was like leaving the bolts and nails in. 

RL: Are you leaving the scaffolding to show how the thing is built?

MT: To show how it’s built, absolutely, and to show the mental machinations—stop, start, stop, start—because that’s what it is to write. That’s what it is to examine something, an inquiry, a confrontation. You’re like: Okay., this; okay., but wait, no; okay., no, no; okay, what was I saying? I wanted to show the cogs, the process of wondering, of questioning, of attempting answers with the knowledge that you never will have an answer. 

RL: Near the end of the book, we finally hear back from your sister Marjorie. I found it so interesting that you chose to include her voice. Before that moment, we get a sense of, not just how much you miss her, but also—through this interplay between the present-day material and the stuff you wrote as an 18-year-old—we feel the quality of her being missed and the fact that she’s missing. When her voice comes in, it’s really moving. 

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MT: If you’re thinking about her absence, her silence, then to bring in her voice has meaning. There’s context there. I remember, when I was writing the book, my mother came to me. She’d been going through her stuff, as she does from time to time, and she said she had that letter. Even though it was a letter to me, for whatever reason it was with her stuff. We all live together anyway, so a lot of my stuff is in boxes in her basement, and some of her stuff is here. She said, “Oh, here’s your letter, I thought you’d want to see this.” I was very happy to have it. I had started writing without the idea of bringing her in, so it was that kind of serendipitous thing. She gave it to me, and I thought, yeah, I want to put this in.

RL: Kismet.

MT: Totally. Like, she was giving me this gift and there was some sort of other level of consciousness working—Miriam needs something here. It wasn’t a coincidence.

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