THE NUMBER ONE INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER A FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARDS 2025 ‘The best memoir you will read all year’ NICK HORNBY ‘A triumphant meditation on loss, literature and the unspoken’ GUARDIAN ‘Curious and idiosyncratic and enjoyable’ ZADIE SMITH ‘Darkly moving and heart-wrenchingly funny’ MARIE CLAIRE The internationally bestselling author of Women Talking and All My Puny Sorrows, Miriam Toews, returns with a singular memoir celebrating disobedient memory, wit, writing and life. ‘Why do you write?’ the organiser of a literary event in Mexico City asks Miriam Toews. Each attempted answer from Toews – all of them unsatisfactory to the organiser – surfaces new layers of grief, guilt and futility connected to her sister’s suicide.
She has been keeping up, she realises, a decades-old internal correspondence, filling a silence she barely understands. And we, her readers, come to see that the question is as impossible to answer as deciding whether to live life as a comedy or a tragedy.
