Why We Write, Why We Live, with Miriam Toews

An edited version of this conversation is now available as part of our collaboration with The Yale Review . Read it here: Trigger warning: This is a tender, funny, and hopeful conversation, that inevitably touches on the subjects of suicide and depression. Please be advised before listening. In this moving and intimate discussion, Miriam Toews joins Adam Biles at Shakespeare and Company to talk about her memoir A Truce That Is Not Peace . Beginning with the question “Why do I write?”, Toews embarks on a deeply personal exploration of creativity, doubt, family, and loss. She reflects on her Mennonite upbringing, the deaths of her father and sister, and the ways in which writing—and laughter—have helped her make sense of pain and love. With warmth, wit, and clarity, Toews examines the limits of narrative, the pull of silence, and the stubborn hope that persists in the face of despair. A meditation on grief, rebellion, and the meaning of home, this is a conversation about how to keep living, and how to keep creating, when life itself resists coherence. Buy A Truce That Is Not Peac e: * Miriam Toews is the author of the bestselling novels Women Talking, All My Puny Sorrows, Summer of My Amazing Luck, A Boy of Good Breeding, A Complicated Kindness, The Flying Troutmans, Irma Voth, Fight Night and one work of nonfiction, Swing Low: A Life. She is the winner of the Governor General’s Award for Fiction, the Libris Award for Fiction Book of the Year, the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize and the Writers’ Trust Engel/Findley Award. She lives in Toronto. Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. Listen to Alex Freiman’s latest EP, In The Beginning: Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Why We Write, Why We Live, with Miriam Toews is an episode from Shakespeare and Company by Shakespeare and Company.

This episode is 49:26 long.

This episode was published on Nov 13, 2025.

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