by Miriam Toews
First published 2025
Miriam Toews stands before an audience in Mexico City when someone asks her why she writes. The question seems simple, but her attempts to respond reveal decades of suppressed grief about her sister's suicide. Each answer falls short, exposing guilt and loss she has carried alone for years. Toews discovers she has been conducting an internal conversation all this time, struggling to understand a void that defies explanation. The question proves as impossible to answer as deciding whether life should be approached as comedy or tragedy. In her debut work of personal nonfiction, Toews explores the difficult relationship between writers and their memories. She develops a unique literary approach to reconstruct her experience, weighing invention against restraint and lightness against gravity. The book transforms personal tragedy into something that encompasses both pain and pleasure, sorrow and laughter, capturing the full spectrum of human experience.
Genres: essays, literary-fiction, contemporary, memoir, biography-memoir
Vibes: emotionally-raw, intimate, introspective, lyrical, meditative, thought-provoking
Tropes: fragmented-narrative, internal-monologue, metafictional, unreliable-narrator
Setting: Mexico City
Paperback
Content warnings: death, suicide