Why I Write?
“OMG NOBODY CARES IF YOU FINISH YOUR NOVEL. Unless you are Miriam Toews.”
Back when I used to spend too much time being flippant on Twitter, I once tweeted something like, “OMG NOBODY CARES IF YOU FINISH YOUR NOVEL. Unless you are Miriam Toews.” The self-importance of writers has always irked me, likely because it hits too close to home. It’s embarrassing, and I’d been triggered by yet another writer performing going through the motions of holing up in a hotel room, staying up for multiple nights, and finally cranking out the end of that novel that had almost destroyed them. I think I was also envious because hotel rooms are expensive and I can’t afford one, and it just seemed important for me to express that none of us actually has to do this if we hate it so much, if it’s hard.
Like, the world won’t end if you don’t write a book. Unless you’re Miriam Toews.
And I don’t know why it was Miriam Toews who was the exception. I hadn’t put any thought into the matter, but it just made sense, and it still does—there is something pure and essential about Toews’ writing. Her books are so heart-wrenching and full of pain that they feel like a person would only write them if they had absolutely no choice in the matter. And oh, I do think the world could not afford to be without her books, which I can’t say definitively about the work of many others.
So it was strange to pick up her latest release, the slim and yet still wildly divergent memoir A Truce That Is Not Peace, and discover that sometimes even Miriam Toews finds herself uncertain about just what the purpose of the writing life is, what her words are really for.
