Abigail Thomas, a Woodstock resident for the last 22 years, has had a remarkable 60-plus-year literary journey as an award-winning author of memoirs, novels, short stories, essays, poems and children’s books. Early in her career, Abby worked as a “slush reader” for Viking Press, a book editor, and a literary representative. She has also been a writing teacher, mentor, and guide.
In her most recent memoir, “Still Life at Eighty: The Next Interesting Thing,” Abigail advises aspiring writers to write about what they notice and see what happens. She does a lot of that. She has also said she doesn’t believe in chronology, and advises, “If anyone ever says the word narrative arc to you, leave the room.”
Abby, what inspired you to start writing?
I was miserably married. I was very unhappily married to my first husband, and I started to write poems. My poems were short. They were about what my life was like, but not much detail. And I kept on doing that for, I don’t know, maybe 10 years. They weren’t scary, because you didn’t have to write words that went all the way across the page, and they got published in good places. My father also wrote poems, including a really great poem called Millennium. I can remember most of it.
When did you start writing stories?
I had always wanted to write, and I didn’t consider writing poems, at least what I was doing, as really writing, and I would try, and it just was terrible. I just couldn’t do it. Words that went all the way across the page scared the shit out of me.
And then, I went up to New Hampshire to visit a writer whose book I had edited. I think I was 38, 37. I was divorced for the second time, and I met a young guy, and we began to talk. Anyway, the long and the short of it is that he said, “I’m taking you four wheeling.” And we went for a week in his red pickup with a bumper sticker that read, “Too cute to stay home,” and we did what you’d expect us to do. And he knew nothing about me, didn’t know I had children who were older than he was. He had no idea anything about me. And so it was like two people, you know, this kid and me sort of ad-libbing in the front seat of the car. There was nothing about me that was there, except just I was there.
And coming back to New York, I saw a sign that said, “Just get some writing done.” And I really think it had something to do with having been just ad-libbing for a week that made me think, okay, I’ll just go get some writing done.
That sign was Bill Roorbach’s — he’s a novelist who was giving a workshop near where I lived, on 112th and Riverside. He read from “Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind” (“In the beginner’s mind, there are many choices; in the expert’s mind there are few.”), and also from “The Expert’s Mind Review.”
Bill said, “write with your beginner’s mind.” And I thought, I qualify. I finally qualify. I have a beginner’s mind. And the first story I wrote got published in the Columbia Journal of Poetry and Prose or something like that. And then I was off and writing.
What did you write about?
I’ve had an interesting life and I would take a story from my life and break one or two of its bones, keep the feelings and then hang them on a completely different skeleton and see what happened.
For instance, my first husband was not a good guy, and what I did in a story was I made him into a good enough guy, and I made his wife, the narrator, in love with him, but he was still in love with his high school sweetheart. It was a shotgun marriage, neither person ready or able to be either married or a parent. So all the feelings of uncertainty and misery of my first marriage were there, and I put it all into a story. I used many of the emotions I remembered, but it was a different story, and I didn’t know what it would turn into.
What role has your curiosity played in your writing?
The least consequential thing you notice, that makes you curious, just start writing. And the more ridiculous it is, the more interesting it will be to find out why it aroused your curiosity. And it can be nothing at all. But it can be profound, and it can wind up “profounder” than you think it’s going to be.
Noticing is key when you’re a writer. And being curious. You have to be curious if you’re a writer because you want to see what’s going to happen. Especially when you have no idea what’s going to happen when you start.
You’ve written four memoirs. What can you tell us about writing memoir?
There needs to be a certain ruthlessness when you’re writing, but most particularly about yourself. If you find something about yourself you’d rather not know, you have first of all to realize it’s getting all this power from the dark, and you have to bring it up to the light. There are two rules about writing memoir: You can’t make anything up and you can’t skip the hard stuff. You have to look at yourself because that’s part of it, it’s part of the journey of writing. How did you get to be the person you are? And there’s all kinds of little things along the way you really would rather not know.
This is my other standard line. The more vulnerable you allow yourself to be, the stronger you become. And that’s really true. Warts and all.
There are all kinds of memoirs; everybody writing a memoir has a different way of doing it. There was a wonderful memoir, “Love, Loss, and What I Wore,” by Ilene Beckerman. And in it, there would be a little writing on one page and then a drawing of what she remembered wearing at a certain occasion. And happy and not happy, all of it, it was a perfect book.
I always think that if you’re writing a memoir and you know where you’re going to end, if you actually end there, you’re doing something wrong. Because along the way, you’re going to get surprised either by something you don’t want to know about yourself or something else.
How would you describe the themes that run through your memoirs?
The theme of my first memoir, “Safekeeping,” was “loss,” although I didn’t know why I was writing all this stuff. My second husband, Quinn, we’d had an okay marriage and then it got bad and then we got divorced. And it wasn’t good for the kids, any of it. But then we became very close friends.
And I engaged in some magical thinking, thinking that if our kids saw us when we were together in this very different way — sometimes you have to get marriage out of the way so you can become friends, which is what you’re supposed to be — I kept thinking the longer we’re friends and they see us together, maybe the past would be erased, it’d just go away. And then he died and the paint was all dry on the past and I couldn’t change it anymore.
And I didn’t realize that that was why I was suddenly writing all these things that seemed to have nothing to do with anything. Nobody wanted it, because it’s in first person, second person, third person, and there’s no narrative arc. If anyone ever says the word narrative arc to you, leave the room. Anyway, Robin Desser at Knopf was interested and she was wonderful, and she bought it and it was published.
And then I wrote “A Three Dog Life.” My third husband, Rich, had a traumatic brain injury and never recovered. He lived for seven more years at the Northeast Center because he wasn’t well enough to live at home. I moved here, to Woodstock, to be close to him.
That book was about loss and facing things about myself, because there was a moment when I asked myself, because we know how to sabotage ourselves, if I could go back and make his accident never have happened, would I do it, and I hesitated.
So I went to my bible, “The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots.” That’s the book I read. Oh, I don’t read it. I love it. I looked up “survival,” I looked up “guilt.” And then everything I looked up didn’t help me at all. And then my sister, Eliza, said, “yes, yes, yes. Maybe you just haven’t accepted it, if you keep going back to before.” So I looked up “acceptance” and that came — this is gonna make me cry again — that came from a word that used to mean a thread used in weaving, and you can’t keep pulling it out, you have to weave it in and go on weaving. And I was weeping. And the guilt went away and it changed my life forever after. It just changed everything on that dime.
My next book, “What Comes Next and How to Like It,” that’s about a longtime friendship. Chuck and I had been friends for about twenty years, ever since he walked into Viking to work alongside me as a slush reader, when something happened that caused a rupture in our relationship. I didn’t want to talk to him, didn’t want to see him again. After a couple of weeks he sent me an email that said, “I can’t lose you like this. Will you have supper with me?” So I did. But the supper did nothing to comfort either one of us. It was like trying to iron the wrinkles out of something that was composed entirely of wrinkles. But he asked again, I went again, and there was still nothing. But after another time or two, I realized what we were going to lose, and how precious it had been, and I softened. We began to laugh at something he said, and it then was almost like we got into a great big truck and floored it, driving right through the wall and we were friends again, closer than ever, and we also completely and utterly trusted each other. So that’s what that book is about. But it’s also about whatever else was going on, whatever the weather was or what the dogs were doing or whatever we said to each other when Chuck came for supper. I don’t know. It’s about a million things, but it ends up with friendship that had its serious difficulties and could have been broken, but became stronger.
Then “Still Life at Eighty: The Next Interesting Thing” began as a book about how freeing it was to finally be old. So many preoccupations and self-conscious moments had been left in the road behind me, it was almost like being able to fly. But then Covid arrived, and I woke up one night filled with dread. I was familiar with panic attacks, bouts of depression and anxiety, but I always knew why. But dread? It had no face, no details. I remember that first night going downstairs to turn the radio on just to hear voices that reminded me I was not a lizard in a nightgown, I was a human being. I wrote a lot about dread.
My friend Chuck wasn’t well enough to read by the time I wrote “Still Life,” and then he died — we were best friends for 40 years and then he died — and all my life when I’d written something I’d show it to Chuck and if he liked it I knew it was good. If he didn’t, I either scrapped it or worked on it, but this book, he had never read any part of and so I really didn’t know whether this was any good or not. I still really don’t know.
This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.