Overview

• A Truce That Is Not Peace is Toews’s second memoir, moving from earlier fictionalization to an unmasked account of living with intergenerational suicide.
• The book adopts an associative structure with inserted letters, mid‑chapter epigraphs, curated lists and vivid images such as a dreamed shooting, a planned Wind Museum and a recurring “deranged skunk.”
• Prompted by a request to explain why she writes for a Mexico City event that later cancels her appearance, Toews uses the memoir itself as her answer.
• Family history anchors the narrative, including her sister Marjorie’s 2010 suicide years after their father’s, extensive letters Toews wrote to Marjorie, and probing of silence versus speech.
• Reviewers from BookPage and the Guardian praise the work’s dark humor, domestic immediacy and formal invention, concluding that bearing witness to grief can offer reprieve.