A TRUCE THAT IS NOT PEACE

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.