A TRUCE THAT IS NOT PEACE

Novelist Toews (Fight Night) delivers a haunting meditation on writing and death in her first work of nonfiction. When Toews was invited to a literary conference in Mexico City, organizers asked her to submit an answer to the question "Why do you write?" Personal anecdotes, literary quotes, and biographical snippets about authors who died by suicide tumbled onto the page in response. Expanding on those thoughts, Toews unearths layers of grief in between bouts of profane humor ("My four-year-old grandson calls his one-year-old brother a fucking noodle head, and now I'm the one in a trouble") and mundane memories of backpacking trips and encounters with wildlife near her Toronto home. Her father and sister both killed themselves, each enveloped by long bouts of silence before their deaths, and Toews struggled to hold on in the aftermath, dreaming of being shot in the face and envisioning her own drowning. While often conversational, Toews's prose has the power stop the reader in her tracks: "Silence and writing are, if not quite the same thing, then allies," Toews muses, "each a misdirection of the unspeakable, and each a way of holding on." At once modest and profound, this slim volume packs a major punch. Readers will be wowed. (Aug.)

Acclaimed Canadian novelist Toews delivers a sometimes wrenching but often funny memoir. Does it mean something, Toews wonders, that she dreamed that Mel Gibson ran off with her cell phone just before "someone shot me at close range, in the face"? Perhaps, for, as she reveals in the next breath, she once considered throwing herself into a swift-flowing river, contenting herself in the end by simply throwing her phone into the water instead. Touching on therapy, suicide, family, betrayal, and a dozen other themes, Toews' narrative--epistolary at turns, poetic at others, always keenly observant--hinges on a recurrent question about the meaning of writing when silence is also a possibility, a question inspired by a writing colloquium whose judges rejected her because, they complained, she responded to the question "Why do I write?" with something more along the lines of "Why am I a writer?" ("Douchebag question either way," she grumbles; "douchebag" is an oft-repeated word, as when she ventures editorial self-advice: "Let's set out the douchebag moments in the text and eliminate them.") It's not her only writerly disappointment, but for every dark moment there's a countervailing quip: "I think I'm nuts. I honestly think I need a psychiatrist….Or maybe I just need to drink less coffee." Although she's a far cry from Erma Bombeck, Toews does have a lively, memorable way of recounting the travails of modern family life: "Three balls and a diaper are stuck in the Christmas tree branches, too high to reach, and my mother is strung out on oxys, because her trigeminal neuralgia is back." And speaking of Toews' mother, an anecdote about her being kidnapped by the unlikeliest of criminals is worth the price of admission all by itself. A fine turn to nonfiction by a superbly accomplished storyteller. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.