On the surface this slim, razor-sharp memoir is a response to a question posed to the author by the organizer of a literary event in Mexico City: “Why do you write?” But such a prompt in the hands of Toews, the author of eight novels, including Fight Night (Bloomsbury, 2021), Women Talking (Bloomsbury, 2019), and All My Puny Sorrows (McSweeney’s, 2014), serves as highly combustible fuel for a fast-paced, genre-bending examination not of her reasons but rather her will to write. In short, sharp bursts of prose that are often both joyful and devastating on the same page, Toews excavates layer after layer of grief and guilt as she explores her uneasy pact with memory: Her father and sister both killed themselves after long bouts of silence. “The immense altering of silence, of writing. It is the same. We are sisters. We are thieves. We steal ourselves, and others, and we alter them, Frankenstein them, ourselves, into something that tracks, that scans, that makes sense, that remains,” she writes. “Why do you write? Why do you live?”
