Spring stayed underground through all of April. This was a long Vermont record-breaking cold winter. Then the spring bulbs exploded in a sudden mid-May heat wave. They danced up the driveway and over to the neighbors and down the road. Our eight-month old puppy had never seen spring, was startled by the grass. He and our older dog raced each other through the flowers.  I left the dogs and the daffodils to go to town.

In town, we settled in at our favorite bookstore to listen to Abigail Thomas read from her latest memoir, What Comes Next and How to Like It. I had inhaled the book, as one does when the language is captivating, something quirky is being explained, the life of the author offers bits of your own, and you are pretty sure you better pay attention because other bits may be yours one day in the not so distant future. I’d pulled Thomas’ two other memoirs, Safekeeping: Some True Stories From a Life and A Three Dog Life: A Memoir from my bookcase. Thomas’ Thinking About Memoir, which is full of writing challenges — I mean, two-page writing exercises –was on my desk. Her sister Eliza Thomas’ memoir, The Road Home was also in the pile. I read that one to get a grip on being an adoptive parent when my  toddlers were napping.

I pull out Thomas’ Safekeeping every time I want to write but just can’t, or don’t. That’s about five times so far. Maybe I’ll start it again tonight.  I rarely stand in line for autographs, but I waited at the end of the line for Thomas to sign my copy of What Comes Next and How to Like it.

What is it?  What’s so darn compelling about this author’s writing?

Take these opening lines. They are the dresses Abigail wears as she makes her entrances:

“Before I met you I played my music on a child’s Victrola.”

                                                                                             Safekeeping

“This is the one thing that stays the same: my husband got hurt.”

                                                                                            A Three Dog Life

“I have time to kill while waiting for the sun to dry, and I’m mulling over the story I spent years writing and failed to turn into anything, trying not to be depressed.”

                                                                                       What Comes Next and How to Like It.

These books are all about the messiness of living.  The children are caught up in spinach and scrambled eggs, a divorce, or the loss of a father. With each edition we glean the benefit of Thomas’ artful reflections, making sense of a life, rather than divvying tidbits up in the free form of fiction. We see life as complex and so often confounding with betrayals and cancer and grandchildren, and Oh, the dogs!  Thomas’ sisters offer  clarity. Doctors, nurses, and friends help her through.  She is that whole constellation of wife, sister, mother, grandmother, friend, and woman alone dealing with the stark skies of reality.

As we all are. Yet these are not linear texts. The dogs are loud, restless, and destructive—just as are the people and events of her life. Utterly unpredictable, too, which is why wondering What Comes Next is followed by and How to Like It. We must, we always must find the way to get through the day, the years, the consequences.

How does Thomas manage to leap in the essence and stay in the crucial details too?  Safekeeping and What Comes Next offer the reader a page or two at a time, a  scene or reflection that advances the history, the locations, the honest truth of the moment. Each page is a clue, a piece of the puzzle stripped down to the bones. This is Haiku prose. Layers of images start to build and the portrait appears. But it isn’t still life, there is so much living going on. As we learn in that first page of What Comes Next, the sun dries and only then can she add the paint for the clouds around it.

At Bear Pond Books, after Thomas’ reads, I wait patiently in the line, watching the audience thin, wonder what is taking so long with the guy at the podium with her. I have no idea what to say to her. Let him take his time. Finally I am face to face with the writer whose honesty thrills me, who is just a little older, so I know of but didn’t live her references, and her musical taste is before mine. Our lives have similarities: smoking, drinking, Woodstock, NY (I lived there some twenty years prior to her residence and missed all that 1969 sex), roasting chickens, baking cookies for kids, her painting, my photography, love of language, love of students finding voice through writing. I’ve only two dogs to her three. I write about the life and death issues too, just different ones.

It is my turn and my mind is blank.

“I love you!” I exclaim to my surprise.

She beamed as she autographed my book. “Come to Woodstock,” she wrote.

Abigail Thomas

Safekeeping: Some True Stories From A Life.  Anchor Books: NY. 2000.

A Three Dog Life: A Memoir. Harcourt, Inc.: NY. 2006.

Thinking About Memoir. AARP Sterling: NY. 2009.

What Comes Next and How to Like It: A Memoir. Scribner: NY. 2015

Eliza Thomas

The Road Home. Delta, New York, 1997.