“Why Do I Write?” You Might Not Like My Answer

This article contains discussions of suicide. If you or someone you know is having a suicide crisis, please call Suicide Crisis Helpline (9-8-8). There is also the Hope for Wellness Helpline for Indigenous people across Canada (1-855-242-3310).

April 2023

I’ve agreed to join a “Conversación” in Mexico City. This is not really a conversation but an event where a series of writers from all over the world read a story or an essay or a thing they’ve written on a specific subject, a subject determined by the Conversación Comité in Mexico City. The subject this time is “Why do I write?”

I’ve replied to the director of the Conversación: Why do I write? Or . . . Why write?

Why do I write, he said.

Is silence the disciplined alternative to writing?

A student of English literature, whose class I recently visited, has suggested that now is the time for me to stand back and listen. I’ve had a “platform” long enough.

But what then—if I stop writing? I don’t want a platform. I am listening. What an awful word! Platform.

Dear Comité, Why do I write?

After her remark about my platform, the student told me that she and her boyfriend and another couple had recently rented an old stone farmhouse in the countryside.

Where I will be exiled for re-education? I asked her.

There was a pause.

I apologized. I was angry, I said, that I was forced to argue with my ex-husband about our arrangement for my royalties. I am angry, I said, at so many things. Men, really, I said. Or, I don’t know. I don’t know anything. It’s so boring. I’m sorry.

The student nodded, put her hand on my arm, and led me away down a corridor. I’m sorry, I said again and again. I reminded myself to ask about her thesis.

There’s an element of impulsivity to suicide, a therapist friend told me. We were walking along the edge of the steep bluff that forms a horseshoe around Niagara Falls.

Yes? I said.

I don’t believe my father and my sister were impulsive. They spent their lives planning their deaths, living their deaths, almost dying every day, dying almost every day.

And they wrote and wrote and wrote. My mother, on the other hand, doesn’t want to write or need to write, and she doesn’t worry about being understood or about escaping herself or erasing herself. She understands herself. She reads whodunits to solve problems, but not the problem of herself. She is not a problem to herself. And she is not suicidal.

How does it happen that only she among us doesn’t write? Has she done as W. B. Yeats instructed? Does she live by conceiving of life as a tragedy?

I once read a description of Jackson Pollock’s paintings as “Genius . . . full of symbols that hinted at a subject but never slipped into narrative.”

And I thought: Let’s set out the douchebag moments in the text and eliminate them.

Narrative as something dirty, to be avoided—I understand this. I understand narrative as failure. Failure is the story, but the story itself is also failure. On its own, it will always fail to do the thing it sets out to do—which is tell the truth. (Douchebag!) The story harnesses and neuters and confines and kills. Unless there is a reader or a person listening. Or watching. (Douchebag.)

But for those who wish to erase themselves by writing, why write at all? But for those who wish to erase themselves by writing, why write at all?

I think of my four-year-old grandson, who is creating a series of paintings entitled Ghosts in Cages. I think of my son on that day decades ago when I’d finally worked up the nerve to explain that his father had taken off to Osaka or Hiroshima or somewhere, who knows where, when my son was a baby. It wasn’t my son’s fault; it was bewildering, I knew that; it was inexplicable, it was so many things, it hurt, it was hard.

And he asked me, tears in his eyes: Can we not go overboard in the talking department?

Once, much later, when my son’s girlfriend asked him if he was ready to go to his in-laws’ place for breakfast, he pulled the bedsheets up around his shoulders and told her, Picture this: No.

I think of a filmmaker who, when asked about a certain film he’d made, responded: “I don’t know why I made it, but I know how . . . by not looking right into a defined, specific image. I want to show with ambiguity (not riddles), with touch, with all that is peripheral, so the viewer can walk in. Yes, walk into the film and be free.”

I think: Communion.

I think of standing in Lisbon beside my daughter, who was five months pregnant with her son, listening to fado sung by a mother and daughter, back and forth, to each other. We don’t understand the words, but we know the meaning.

Is writing life? Is it murderous? A crime? Robbery? A kidnapping? An alternative narrative? An alternative narrative to what? Is it both death and survival? An erasure? Is suicide both death and survival? Is writing a type of suicide? Is silence the reasonable alternative to the alternative of narrative? Which is a crime, which a failure? And what happens next? (Doooooooouchebag.)

Why, I asked my mother, were they silent? Meaning, my father and my sister.

That’s easy, she said. (Easy?) It was something they could control.

My therapist friend—the one who walked with me along the bluff around Niagara Falls—had lost a child to cancer. She hated some of the things people said to her afterward.

I can’t imagine your sorrow. I can’t imagine your pain.

Yeah, you fucking can! You can fucking imagine it. Go ahead and fucking try.

My friend told me she’d never felt more alone and sealed off in her coffin of grief than when people told her, even lovingly, even with tender hugs, that they couldn’t imagine her sadness.

Try! Stay! Stay with me.

What will happen if I stop writing, I want to ask the student of English literature.

I must travel to the moon’s navel and deliver an answer. Soon.

M y mother and me, standing at the open coffin of my sister, her head sewn back together, a capital Y in stitches across her face.

Good question.

He’d done his very best. This is what the man who made the stitches told us.

We looked at my sister.

At what point did we look away, at each other, and leave?

I didn’t understand my sister’s silence. It annoyed me, disturbed me. Do I understand it now? Now that I am older?

I don’t want a platform.

My sister is the stark white space around our cluttered, battered, inserted, deleted, ridiculous prose, our messy ink, fouling octopi trapped in barrels on boat decks, gulls shrieking, flailing, dark words and murderous sentences. And she says infinitely more than we do.

In that silence, was she holding on to something tightly with every muscle, every bit of energy, her soul, her self? Tethering?

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Why did they do it, my father and my sister? To kill themselves, to stay alive, to stop themselves from moving further and further away from the truth, that aimless drift, that spit of land? Or to escape the truth?

Is writing the acceptable alternative to killing oneself? Does suicide end the pain and preserve the truth? Does writing attempt to achieve the same thing, and are both suicide and writing incomprehensible?

I wouldn’t use the word “futile,” I once said to my Russian Jungian shrink about writing. But did I say that because I didn’t want to be locked up?

Why write?

How I wish the question from the Conversación was simply: Why? The Y carved into my sister’s face, stitched up, answered, emphatically, finished. What a fucking bullshit thing is this fucking bullshit Conversación I’m supposed to be writing for Mexico City! A mile and a half up in the sky in the navel of the moon. Somebody told me that living in Mexico City is like smoking one and a half packs of cigarettes a day, so I will start smoking now as part of my training for the Conversación.

Many years ago, my children and I watched a tightrope artist perform on the boardwalk in Halifax. He did tricks on the wire. He was a clown. But not a particularly good one. He fell off his wire, even though it was only a foot or two above the ground, and began to moan. He lay there crumpled and clutching his ankle and calling out for help. He took his hat off and put it under his head as a pillow on the hard pavement. We laughed and clapped. We thought his fall was part of the show, that he’d get up, bow and pass his hat.

But he didn’t get up, and he didn’t stop calling for help. Nobody in the audience moved to help him. We laughed, then we stopped laughing and looked at him, at each other. What was happening?

I’m really hurt, he said. The show is over.

We didn’t believe him. How could this be? He hadn’t merely broken the fourth wall, he had broken every rule of show business. Eventually, an audience member went to help him, waving the rest of us away. It was true—the wire artist was genuinely injured, and the show was over. My kids and I wandered off, embarrassed and unsettled.

Why did he do that? my daughter asked me. I shook my head. My son looked away.

It haunts me, the memory of the wire walker’s unwillingness to go on with the show.

Suicides and overdoses are now being called deaths of despair in the newspapers, in the studies, in the statistics.

My therapist friend says: We’ll be dead, so we won’t feel pain, yes. But in the meantime, we anticipate the end of life, of love, of beauty, of the beautiful world, and in that anticipation, we feel so much pain that we bring on the end. To end the pain of anticipating the end.

April 2023

The director of the Conversación has informed me that my submission is still not suitable.

“Please you must simply answer the question: Why Do I Write? What is your reason?”

Okay, Conversación director. The writing is the reason.

Has the reason I write been removed by the reason I write, even though the reasons for writing remain?

When we do, we really do, but we don’t really, do we?

I understand entirely, I write back to the director of the Conversación.

I am an annoyance. Soy molesto.

I annoy myself.

I am a docent at the terrarium.

That is a calming sitz bath of a sentence.

W hy do I write?

Because she asked me to.

My sister asked me for all sorts of things. To write her letters, to help her live, to help her die, to understand, to try to understand, to stop trying to understand, to let her go, to go away, to come back, to make lists, to race to the pharmacy while she bled out in that weird shag-carpeted bathroom of our old house on the highway in that freaky town in the exact middle, the very heart (so it says on a giant billboard) of the continent.

Why would I go to the navel of the universe when I can go to its heart?

Are writing and suicide related? The same thing? Or estranged relatives, at least? Angry siblings whose origins are the same. An attempt—a fragment of an attempt—to save life, preserve life, to freeze it in a moment, to end what is real, to survive by ending. To preserve, in silence, what is authentic.

Writing is artifice and silence is truth. No? Well, yes. No?

But writing is life, listen to me, you clown, you don’t quit, you don’t grimace and wave away your audience, tell them the show is over. Writing is life, and silence is the final step before the metal rail, the sharp scent of creosote, the wind.

Why must I draw a comparison between writing and suicide?

To stay with her. To stay with them.

Yes, you can imagine my suffering. Yeah, you fucking can. Try! Stay with me.

That’s easy! (Remembering my mother’s response to my question about why they—my father, my sister—went silent.)

It was something they could control. (They could control the beginning of not-being?)

After the madness, the divorce, the sickness, my sister’s silence, the dread, here we go again: the only thing I can control is the writing. Or, the only other thing I can control, the only alternative to doing away with myself, as they (who?) say.

I will go there with you. I will go right to the very edge of the rail where you can smell the creosote, feel the limestone shale give way under your feet—or is it ballast?—a small earth quaking.

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. Something not corporeal, this strange non-thing.

But being alive is worth something.

Why do you write?

Why do you live?

April 2023

The Conversación Comité has officially dropped me, uninvited me. I haven’t adequately answered the question, they tell me, and my submission has been rejected. If you look at the program online, you will see my head-and-shoulders photo with a black bar through it, and the word CANCELLED.

Adapted and excerpted, with permission, from A Truce That Is Not Peace by Miriam Toews, published by Knopf Canada, an imprint of Penguin Random House Canada. Copyright © 2025 by Miriam Toews.