Two years ago, for an event in Mexico City, the Canadian novelist Miriam Toews was asked to compose an essay about why she writes. Her unsuccessful attempts to answer the question turned into her new memoir, A Truce That Is Not Peace, which, as Kristen Martin wrote this week, sees her reckoning with the suicides of her father and her sister, and examining the forces that made her an author. She turns to other writers’ work for help, and finds one poet’s reflection on grief and childhood especially useful.  

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic’s books section:

• “June,” a short story by Daniel J. O’Malley
• A new theory puts parenting at the center of human evolution.
• “Irresistible Contentment,” a poem by Prageeta Sharma

That essay is the poet Christian Wiman’s “The Limit,” which gives Toews’s memoir its title. In it, Wiman looks back on the violence that marked both his childhood in West Texas and his family’s history, and seems to gather that his past made his writing career inevitable. His conclusion is somewhat counterintuitive, because when he first began reading poetry, in college, he believed that “it had absolutely nothing to do with the world I was from.” But he no longer believes that assumption was entirely accurate. In poetry, he found something kinetic, and he relished “the contained force of its forms, the release of its music,” which seemed to reflect the tumult of his youth. As a writer, Wiman describes “reinventing” his past, hoping to turn it into a self-contained story that he could fully leave behind.

Martin points to a different motivation in Toews’s case. In the years since the deaths of her father and sister, writing has been a way to continue her conversations with them. Toews first began composing prose when she was a teenager and her older sister, Marj, asked her to send her letters. Decades later, after Marj’s suicide, Toews continues putting pen to paper in search of some kind of organized story. Maybe that’s why “The Limit” so moved her—in his essay, Wiman suggests that writing might allow us to “remember the dead without being haunted by them, give to our lives a coherence that is not ‘closure,’ and learn to live with our memories, our families, and ourselves.” Toews seems to understand that even if no sense can be made of her relatives’ deaths, and even if she may never find peace, literature remains a way to honor her past. It is also, as Martin observes, a small, incomplete way to keep her family—and herself—alive.

Eating Stone: Imagination and the Loss of the Wild, by Ellen Meloy

When Meloy, a desert naturalist, felt estranged from nature, she sought to cure it by stalking a band of bighorn sheep for a year in Utah’s Canyonlands wilderness. She begins in winter and feels cold and clumsy. She envies the bighorns’ exquisite balance as she watches them spring quickly up cliff faces. She feels “the power and purity of first wonder.” Meloy’s writing is scientifically learned—beautifully so—but this book does not pretend to be a detached study. When she hikes alongside these animals at dawn, she aches to belong. She fantasizes about being a feral child they raised. At first, the band is indifferent to her project. But animal by animal, they begin to let her into their world. To follow her there is to experience one of the sublime pleasures of contemporary American nature writing. Meloy gives an account of their culture, their affections for one another, even their conflicts. All these years after my first read, I can still hear the crack of the rams’ colliding horns echoing off the red rock.  — Ross Andersen

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