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. In the first part of this conversation, Thomas said she doesn’t believe in chronology, and advises, “If anyone ever says the word narrative arc to you, leave the room.”
What about your routine?
I get up in the morning. I write. Or I think. Or I drink a Coca-Cola.
When you’re in gear, I can’t remember what I did last. You’re writing all the time. You’re walking. The back of your mind is working. And you just have to keep yourself ready for it to make its way, because it’s locked from the inside. It’s gotta make its way into the front of your mind, and you gotta be ready for it.
When you’re not writing, some part of you is thinking about what you’re writing. There is no high like it.
What has been your writing process?
What I’m interested in is not the beauty of the sentence. I’m not interested in writing beautiful sentences. I’m interested in the rhythm sentences make, placed next to each other. So that if you have something with a certain rhythm and then you change the rhythm for the next one, the reader knows, because of the change of rhythm, what you’re going through. That’s how daddy wrote. The first sentence of his memoir was, “I have had a bad memory as far back as I can remember. It’s not so much that I forget things, I forget where I put them.”
When I’m writing, I’m writing all the time. I didn’t know that I was writing a memoir when I wrote “Safekeeping,” and “A Three Dog Life,” I wrote to keep myself sane as it was happening. I wrote everything down every day. It was dogs. It was everything I was remembering and feeling, and my husband, Rich.
I can’t organize ahead of time. No, I wouldn’t know how to and I wouldn’t want to.
What’s your process when you write fiction?
So you just take something real, and break a couple of the bones, and then keep the feelings and hang it on this skeleton and see where you go. And that’s how I wrote fiction. Some of it was closer to real. Sometimes I made it up.
And the endings I aim for, I once heard somebody describe it as “the story stops and the reader goes through the windshield.”
What is the best advice you’ve gotten and followed?
The best advice I ever got was write like a beginner because you’re a beginner every time you sit down. It doesn’t matter how many things you’ve written or how good or whatever. Every time you start you are a beginner again which is what’s so interesting about it.
Just write. Write about moments. You can write a whole memoir with little pieces of a moment like “Safekeeping” was. What you remember or what you’re going through. Avoid jargon, don’t think about narrative arc, don’t think about what kind of essay, just write, and see what happens. Don’t boss it around at the beginning. In fact don’t boss it around at all. Just write, it will tell you what it wants to be.
Do you get feedback from readers?
My father always said, make yourself useful, which meant do the dishes. But I’ve never forgotten that because the feeling of being useful is the best feeling in the world, don’t you think? And sometimes you write something that is useful and they’ll tell you so.
“A Three Dog Life” was useful to a lot of people. Somebody wrote to me that she had always felt like the worst person in the world and then she read “Three Dog Life” and now she just felt human. That’s a nice letter to get.
Do you have any writing projects underway or in mind?
I do have an idea. I just write whatever comes into my head and I’m writing a book about something steered towards the elderly. It’s about, what is memoir? Why write one? I don’t know what it is. It’s a big bunch of 130 pages. But a lot of it is the stuff that’s been on my Substack. It makes for a jumping off place.
It’s called “Through The Side Door,” because I think of assignments as the side door. When you want to write something but you don’t know what to write.
What have your challenges been?
Well, my biggest challenge was writing words that went all the way across the paper. That was just impossible. I couldn’t do it. And then Bill Roorbach said to me, you write with your beginner’s mind. And I had a beginner’s mind. And that’s how I got started.
Another challenge was when I had a sort of story in the back of my mind, something somebody told me and I wanted to write it. Her story possessed me. It must have reminded me of my early life, and I began to try to write it, almost as if I’d been in the story. I worked so hard to get it right, and when it felt finished, I handed it in. The story was published. I had no idea that I had stolen the story, it had felt so much as if it had been, or would be, about me. I never realized what I’d done until I ran into the woman whose story it had been, and she casually said that she’d read my story in a magazine, and I was so embarrassed and apologetic and couldn’t stop saying how terrible I felt. But as time passed, I was ashamed, but that story had turned me into a writer. I felt guilty, proud, and ruthless.
What did you learn as a slush reader and as an agent?
One day, a real mess came in to slush, but it was a good story. I passed it around and they let me work on it and we published it. It sold about 8,000 copies, which was more than a lot of things at Viking back then. That was “Juniata Valley” by Virginia Cassel. Anyway, that was exciting. It was a great book. It really did well and it sold well, even though it was a mess when it came in.
And then when I was an agent, a woman named Virginia Dabney sent me sort of the introduction to a book she wanted to write about a farm that she’d grown up on that her mother owned. I think the father was dead or gone. And in the introductory letter, she wrote a lot about looking out the window and the birdsong and the trees and the flowers. And then she said they didn’t have any heat, and at night her mother would put newspapers between the sheets and the blanket for insulation. And I wrote her back and I said, I don’t really need to hear anymore about the birdsong, but I want to know all about those sheets and the newspapers. And a year later, plunked down on my desk was something called “Once There Was a Farm.” And I forget who bought it, but they bought it right, it was an auction. It was wonderful, absolutely wonderful.
Well, all I did was say I want to know more, and that’s where I learned that if you can give a detail like that, with encouragement and suggestions, somebody with talent could write a good book.
Are there particular books or authors that have had an impact on you?
Lucy Grealy wrote a book called “Autobiography of A Face.” She had cancer of the jaw until she died, and it’s honest to a scorching degree, ruthless about herself. It’s a great book.
I’m rereading a book by Anatole Broyard called “Kafka Was the Rage,” which is about Greenwich Village in the ‘40s. Which is really fun. He was a book critic for the New York Times. It’s a great book. He also wrote “Intoxicated by My Illness” when he was dying of cancer.
I tend to go back and read stuff that I’ve always loved, like “My Family and Other Animals” by Gerald Durrell. Funniest book ever written. I really loved “Lucky Jim,” which was the only Kingsley Amis book I really loved. And there’s “So Long, See You Tomorrow,” by William Keepers Maxwell. And in it, there’s a passage about a boy who’s grown up in a very particular way on a farm, it was his whole being. And he’s moved to some other relative’s house. And the passage is something like, “What’s the use of trying to be the boy he used to be? You’ve taken all this away from him, how can he be the boy he used to be. He might as well be some other boy.” I don’t know, it’s a perfect little passage which I’ve never forgotten.
I mean, it’s not just props, although we all need our props, right, to know who we are. I mean, I need this mess. I need the dog, need the red wall, I need the books, I need whatever it is. And if I’m away long enough, I just have to get home and, yeah, there’s the props, yeah, there’s that. You need your stuff. You need the stuff around you that reminds you who you are.
How has living in Woodstock affected you?
The Benedictine Hospital in Kingston had been really helpful when my daughter was sick. It was in the Cancer Support House, which was on Mary’s Avenue, across from what is now the Kingston Hospital. And they had programs where people came and took courses in cooking, eating, dancing, and Tai Chi, and everything.
And I said I’d like to give something back. Can I give a writing workshop? And they said, sure, for five weeks. Well, it went on for 12 years. And the people I knew in that workshop, we became an organism which is the only way to do a workshop, where everybody trusted everybody with everything, and a lot of them died, people I really loved.
I had another writing workshop that I started giving when I got to Woodstock, but it was the one at the Cancer Support House that really sort of wedded me to here.
There must have been 13 or 14 of us. They were all people with cancer. A couple of people had gotten over their cancer, but most of them still had cancer. And most everybody died.
When I couldn’t do it anymore, I left it in the hands of Craig Mawhirt, a wonderful writer and an astute reader, a good editor, too. He had had cancer, and had been in the workshop since the get-go. It lasted another year or so, but around the time the Cancer Support House was sold, a terrible thing to do, a lot of the programs it had offered ended, including the workshop. It was a very upsetting decision, and the end of what had been an important place for people with cancer to take a wide variety of classes, as well as to meet one another. A real community set adrift.
Read part one of the conversation. “Writers of the Catskills” is a series of interviews with literary voices living and writing in The Overlook Region by Howard Altarescu.