You know how it is—the winding and wending through book booths. The writers signing, the multiples of the new fresh things in stacks; it's hard to take it in, at least for me. I never return home from The Events with a bag full of randoms. I return home with the books sought out or placed in my trust. A handful.
But there I was, Friday, at the National Conference for Teachers of English at the National Harbor Convention Center. I'd be doing my own signing in fifteen minutes, but I had time. And so I walked, my eyes cast down, and there it was, a pile of books, the cover whitish and thin, two streaks of color, a title, a name.
Abigail Thomas, I read. Kept walking. Stopped. Backtracked.
Abigail Thomas? At NCTE?
"Um," I said, to the Scribner person.
"Yes?"
"Are you giving these ARCs away? By chance?"
"You want one?"
"Desperately."
"So go ahead."
It was mine! The new Abigail Thomas memoir, coming in March 2015, but I don't have to wait that long. Not me, who loves Abigail Thomas, who sang her praises in
Handling the Truth, who reads her words out loud to my Penn students. Not me. I have
What Comes Next and How to Like It. I read it when I was supposed to be writing, which is to say I read it today. All day and now I'm done, I'm finished, and I'm sad about that, because books this good don't come around too often. Books this good need Abigail Thomas to write them.
"Abigail Thomas is the Emily Dickinson of memoirists," Stephen King has said. UmmHmmm.
Where to start, or have I said enough? A book about friendship and motherhood, about painting and words, about comfort and soup, about sleeping all day, about waking ourselves up, about love, an "elastic" word, Thomas tells us. Proves it. Thomas could blare, in her bio, about a lot of writerly things, but what she says first is this: "Abigail Thomas is the mother of four children and the grandmother of twelve." Yes. That's how Thomas describes herself because that, with infinite beauty, is who she is first. Who she will be. What makes her the powerhouse writer she is. (Though to that description one must add a pile of dogs.) Thomas writes, in this new memoir, about how we hold on knowing that one day we won't. How we outlast ourselves, or live with the fact that outlasting doesn't last.
I loved every torn page. The arrangement of the pages. Thomas's smart abhorrence of chronology. How many times, in class, to students, to writers, have I said:
Don't tell me the story in a straight line. Break the grid. Steer your way toward wisdom by scrambling the sequence of facts.Now I'm just going to read Thomas:
I hate chronological order. Not only do I have zero memory for what happened when in what year, but it's so boring. This comes out of me with the kind of vehemence that requires a closer look, so I scribble on the back of a napkin while waiting for friends to show up at Cucina and it doesn't take long to figure it out. The thought of this happened and then this happened and then this and this and this, the relentless march of events and emotion tied together simply because day follows day and turns into week following week becoming months and years reinforces the fact that the only logical ending from chronological order is death.
Yes. And that, by the way, is a single chapter in a book built (miraculously) of brevities. A book in which the page by page sequencing is as shattering as the pages themselves.
I've had a couple of challenge books sitting around for awhile that have needed some quick reviewing and thought a lazy Sunday was a good time to get them done. Both are loosely based around dogs, though one definitely more than the other.
Lost & Found, written by Jacqueline Sheehan, is the story of Rocky Pelligrino and her search for peace. Having found her husband dead on the bathroom floor after a heart attack, she isn't completely sure where she belongs in the world any longer and thus leaves behind her successful career as a psychologist to move to a remote Maine island and take on the job of Animal Control Warden. It's there that she meets Cooper.
Cooper, a black lab with an arrow lodged in his shoulder, quickly becomes incredibly important to Rocky. He understands her, loves her, and depends on her, like no one else does any longer. Cooper has taken the place of her husband. Unfortunately, when people come around the island and lay claim to Cooper, Rocky has to learn to let go again, with much more difficult and painful results.
A very sad, but light-filled novel of loss and the pure love that animals give off to their humans. I don't know what I would have done without my dog Shae, after this past summer and fall, leaving me very much sympathetic to this story.
Not the best writing (and I found the character of Melissa to be a bit strange and pushy) but an enjoyable plot with a great dog. I read this one for the TBR Challenge.
Lost & Found
Jacqueline Sheehan
304 pages
Adult fiction
Avon
9780061128646
April 2007
Ok, so A Three Dog Life, written by Abigail Thomas, is not exactly about what I thought it was going to be about. I had this impression, I don't know if it was from reading another review or what, that it was about rescuing dogs. Not so. Still a beautifully written book and one that I'm glad fell into my hands. I could have stopped reading after quickly learning the subject matter was not what I thought it was to be, but the writing is really wonderful...didn't want to put it down.
A Three Dog Life is an incredibly heart-wrenching memoir, written in a series of essay vignettes, describing the experiences Thomas went through after her husband's brain injury. After being hit by a car and suffering damage to his frontal lobe, he was never the same, having a complete personality change, no longer loving her, and residing in an assisted living facility.
Though her husband no longer needs her, she still needs him and thus sells their New York City apartment, moving farther upstate to be closer to him. She, along with her three faithful dogs, show signs of healing and growth, even in the years of intense pain and hurt. She didn't abandon the man who was her loving husband, even when she felt abandoned by him.
Really a very inspirational, if not painful, read. The writing is truly wonderful and the emotions Thomas went through come through loud and clear, almost too clear at times! Your heart will break for this woman...
This would make a nice gift for someone going through a rough time, needing some encouragement and inspiration.
I read this one for the Spring Reading Thing Challenge.
A Three Dog Life
Abigail Thomas
208 pages
Adult Non-fiction
Harvest Books
9780156033237
September 2007
To learn more about either title, or to purchase, click on the book cover above to link to Amazon.
