Miriam Toews: There is a self-destructive urge in my family that scares me a lot

BarcelonaCan we live with our dead present without them tormenting us, especially considering that some as significant as the older sister or father have committed suicide? This is one of the driving questions of A Truce That Is Not Peace, the new book by Miriam Toews (Steinbach, 1964), published in Catalan by Les Hores, translated by Octavi Gil Pujol. In the hands of many writers, the autobiographical material she unfolds would be mired in the swamp of traumas. The Canadian author, however, knows how to combine sadness and longing with a surprising sense of humor. She can just as easily rescue an anecdote from the Mennonite Christian community where she grew up as recall a funny family episode from the past – such as the robbery in Ecuador –, mention a book that has recently interested her, and draw the reader into her current reality: the author has had a small house built on the property where her mother, one of her daughters, her partner, and their two children live.

We spoke, a couple of years ago, about May the Flame Not Go Out (in Catalan from Les Hores). There appeared a novelized version of her mother, who at that time was 88 years old. I remember she told me she wanted to write more about her. It has been so: she is one of the main characters in A Truce That Is Not Peace. How is she doing?

— She is very well. She just turned 90. She is in shape and, in fact, she is very busy. Just today I told her we could have lunch together or watch baseball in the evening and she told me it wouldn't be possible. Apparently, she has commitments all day.

In A truce that is not peace we read that his mother likes the game of Scrabble so much that she has participated in tournaments.

— It's been a while since she competed. Maybe it would be too demanding for her. But she remains totally obsessed with Scrabble. In fact, when she plays with my daughter and me, she loses more than before, and that makes her a little sad.

The mother we found in Que no s'apagui la flama was a fictional character. The one from here, along with the rest of the characters and stories, is the real one.

— The only fictional element ofA Truce That Is Not Peace is the starting point. I invented that a festival in Mexico was inviting me to participate, but first I had to answer the question of why I was writing, and none of the answers I sent them convinced them.

There is a passage in the book where we read: "Is writing life? Is it a homicidal act? A crime? A robbery? A kidnapping? An alternative narrative? An alternative narrative to what? Is it simultaneously death and survival? Is it erasure? Is suicide simultaneously death and survival?". We start with life, move through crime and death, and arrive at suicide.

— I started writing A truce that is not peace during a difficult time. I was thinking a lot about my older sister again. I wanted to understand her better, I wanted to relive what we went through together and, of course, also her death. After my sister's suicide, the pain comes and goes. There are very intense stages of grief, but in between, fortunately, there are calmer times.

It is this idea of finding a "truce that is not peace", which comes from an essay by Christian Wiman.

— The truce is always temporary. This is the idea of the book. Difficult moments will return. By writing, you ask yourself questions in order to reach partial answers. Now I have a period of truce with my demons and enemies, with this anxiety that sooner or later will knock on the door again.

Until now, and with the exception of Swing low (2000), the questions I had posed were through fiction: I'm thinking of novels like Les tristes recances (2014) and Una bondat complicada (2004). Was it a way of protecting yourself and yours?

— Distancing myself from experiences through characters is a way of not being so exposed to pain. It is one of the mechanisms of fiction that have served me.

Now, instead of distancing herself from her sister Marjorie, she has had to get closer. Why?

— I don't know exactly why it has gone like this. It's possible that the fact that enough time has passed since her death has something to do with it.

Almost sixteen years, right?

— It was in 2010, yes. Many lives have been born in between. To return to my sister's suicide, it took a lot of strength and to be very desperate. I wanted to go back to her and look her in the face.

Before, I mentioned the struggle with her own "demons". Marjorie's might be the most important, but if we look back, the first one is her father's, Melvin's, right?

— Yes. During these last few years I have made an effort to remember and think about my father. Also to talk more about him. He died at 62 years old. I am 61, now, approaching the age of his end. When it happened I was in my thirties and I saw him as an old man. I loved him and it affected me that he died, but the impact was less due to my perception of him.

To continue being close to him he wrote Swing low, a memoir written in his father's voice. Although he was a very religious man, he decided to end his life. It must have been a controversial decision, in the community to which he belonged.

— Totally. There is great resistance to accepting suicide, in many religious communities. There is the idea that God gives you life and God takes it away. It is a decision that you should not make. It is not up to you. The father was a very religious man. We would never have believed that he would do what he did. For a believer, it is the last option. Imagine how desperate he must have been.

And in the case of his sister?

— When I was 24 years old, she had her first major depression. It was shortly after I left home and the community where I had grown up. She dropped out of her studies, broke up with her boyfriend, and returned home to her parents. This gesture was like returning to the mother's womb.

He stopped talking for a while, right? It was a strategy his father had also put into practice.

— It was a peculiar way they had of controlling the narrative. When my sister stopped speaking at 24, I was about to leave on a bicycle trip through Europe, and I suggested we write each other letters. She thought it was a good idea.

In the book we read a few letters that he sent her in 1982 from Ireland, England, France and Switzerland.

— One of the answers to the question of why I write is: "thanks to my sister". If it weren't for those letters in which I began to find a voice, surely it wouldn't have seemed an interesting enough activity to end up dedicating my life to.

Returning to his father, one of the periods of silence he explains in A Truce That Is Not Peace was between his birth and when he was one year old.

— If it affected me, imagine the impact it must have had on a six-year-old girl like my sister. There were moments, in her state of deep depression, when my father would even forget that I had been born. He would ask my mother who I was. And she would say that I was her youngest daughter.

They chose the name Miriam, which according to the book means "rebellious and bitter." From a young age she had to fight, right?

— Perhaps what happened with my father made me more combative, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that I was someone who always needed to get reactions from others. More than rebellious, I have always felt a bit like a clown.

Although there are many tough memories, in A Truce That Is Not Peace, he also has very funny ones, like that of the first trip he made to talk about one of his novels.

— An associate professor welcomed me into her backyard. She wasn't the professor who had invited me, because she had just fallen in love with someone and couldn't receive me. I had to settle into the shed, sleeping on a mattress that deflated during the night, and to go to the bathroom I had to knock on the house door, as it was always locked. In the end, the novel's presentation was canceled. I lost three days, but I was young and willing to go through it all. I returned home thinking that this was the life of a writer: you had to cross the country by plane to end up in the backyard of a house, waiting for the celebration of an event that would end up being canceled.

There is also the story of how on a family trip to Ecuador they were robbed and their father did not realize what was happening.

— We were very ashamed: because of the robbery, but also because my father didn't realize anything. It's curious that you mention this story, because a few days ago my daughter found the diary that my father wrote during that trip to Ecuador. I looked for the day of the robbery and he noted: "Today we had a terrifying incident. I will explain it later." But he never did.

The one who appears least in the book is his companion, whom he names by his initial, E. Even so, there is a passage in which he says to him, in relation to his family: "I know that you do not speak of the pain you feel; let it kill you and that's it." How has he faced this problem?

— He said it as a joke, and my daughter laughed a lot, even though it was a macabre joke. If it seemed so funny to her, it was because it told a truth that we all at home have tried to correct since what happened happened. At home, we try to talk about pain openly, whether among ourselves, through therapy, or through books. Even if you cannot prevent someone's suicide, you cannot avoid feeling guilty in a thousand different ways, but you must eventually accept that it is the decision that my father, my sister, and a cousin who was very close to me made.

Of this last one, it doesn't speak, in A truce that is not peace.

— It was a couple of years after my father's death. He drowned in the river.

You admit that you also considered suicide by drowning in the river.

— It was shortly after my cousin died. I threw the phone into the river and was about to throw myself in too. There is a self-destructive impulse in my family that scares me a lot. Behind me come the children and the four grandchildren, and they all worry me. None of us want a suicide to be repeated. We are on the lookout and in a state of constant alert. Any sign puts us on guard, which is why we try to talk about any topic related to mental health, even if it is incomprehensible to some extent.