Review: What Comes Next and How to Like It

Abigail Thomas writes a particular type of episodic memoir, in which chapters are often just a few sentences or paragraphs long. Safekeeping is the best example of her style, while A Three Dog Life is her best overall. I would place this latest book somewhere between those two in terms of quality. I was disappointed to find little mention of the aftermath of her husband Rich’s traumatic brain injury (the subject of A Three Dog Life) – he incurred the TBI in 1997 and died in 2007. Perhaps given the number of years in between, Thomas felt the time for writing about Rich had passed.

Instead, this book is more about simple, everyday life: her new hobby of painting on glass; her children and grandchildren; napping with her hound dogs; volunteering as a hospice caregiver as a way of learning what’s truly important in life; teaching a memoir-writing class to people with cancer, who embody a sense of urgency about documenting their lives; meeting up with old acquaintances; blind dates going wrong; and being taken aback by the ageing process (she’s now into her 70s). Like Gail Godwin (see our review of Publishing), Thomas lives in Woodstock, New York, close to the city but still away from the fray.

The overarching theme of this memoir is Thomas’s 30-year friendship with Chuck, whom she met when they were colleagues at a publishing company. They took long lunch breaks and perfected the art of wasting time; their proudest idea was for ‘inaction figures’ named Torpor, Languor, and Stupor. Many years afterwards, Thomas was astonished to find out that Chuck was cheating on his wife – with her own daughter, Catherine! When Catherine was later diagnosed with breast cancer, it was an emotional strain for Chuck, too, even though the affair was long over. Negotiating her loyalties to these two loved ones has been one of the central challenges of Thomas’s recent life.

More so than I’ve noticed before, Thomas’s content and attitude are quite similar to Anne Lamott’s. For instance, both are former alcoholics who have jumped on and off the wagon over the years. The observations on writing here are especially reminiscent of Lamott’s Bird by Bird: “What do we use? That’s easy. We use everything. We have our eyes and ears open to snag the lovely and the harsh and the hilarious. There is ruthlessness to all writers.”

“Don’t give up. Don’t be afraid of the mess. The process is a lot like writing. You start with a wisp of memory, or some detail that won’t let you be. You write, you cross out. You write again, revise, feel like giving up. What pulls us through? Curiosity.”

 

“I am trying to convince myself that failure is interesting…There’s no Indo-European root meaning originally ‘to dare’ or ‘mercy’ or ‘hummingbird’ to make of the whole mess a mysterious poem. I can find no other fossilized remains in the word. Humility comes along on its own dime.”

My favorite individual pieces are just one paragraph each. Here’s a taste of “Chronology”: “I hate chronological order. Not only do I have zero memory for what happened when in what year, but it’s so boring…[it] reinforces the fact the only logical ending for chronological order is death.” In “Hospice,” she accounts for her decision to work with the dying as a volunteer: “I want to make Death a member of my family. I don’t want it to arrive as a stranger.” The chapters are so short that this can be picked up at random in whatever snatches of time a reader has available.

I can see this appealing to fans of Anne Lamott or even Nora Ephron – although Thomas isn’t as humorous in her approach, her thoughts on ageing have a similarly wry quality. This would also serve as an interesting introduction to Thomas’s work for people who don’t like straightforward, birth-onwards autobiographies. It’s not quite as memorable overall as A Three Dog Life, but recommended nonetheless.

What Comes Next and How to Like It: A Memoir releases in the U.S. on March 24th. With thanks to Scribner for allowing me early access to the novel via Edelweiss.

See larger image What Comes Next and How to Like It: A Memoir (Hardcover) By (author): Abigail Thomas From the bestselling author of A Three Dog Life, which “shines with honest intelligence” (Elizabeth Gilbert): a fresh, exhilarating, superbly written memoir about aging, family, creativity, tragedy, friendship, and the richness of life. What comes next? What comes after the devastating loss of Abigail’s husband, a process both sudden and slow? What form does her lifelong platonic friendship take after a certain line is crossed? How to cope with her daughter’s diagnosed illness? Or the death of her beloved dog? Is life worth living without three cocktails before dinner? How do you paint the ocean on a sheet of glass? And how to like it? How to accept, appreciate, enjoy? Who are our most trusted, valuable companions and what will we do for them? Instead of painting an ocean, paint a forest, turn it over, scrape the surface, and presto: there is the ocean. When you’ve given up, when you least expect it, there it is. What Comes Next and How to Like It is an extraordinarily moving memoir about many things, but at the center is a steadfast friendship between Abigail Thomas and a man she met thirty-five years ago. Through marriages, child-raising, the vicissitudes and tragedies of life, it is this deep, rich bond that has sustained her. Readers who loved “the perfectly honed observations of a clear-eyed and witty writer” (Newsweek) in Thomas’s “spare, astonishing” (Entertainment Weekly) memoir, A Three Dog Life, will relish this beautiful examination of her life today—often solitary, but rich and engaging, with children, grandchildren, dogs, a few suitors, and her longtime best friend. List Price: $24.00 USD New From: $18.00 USD In Stock Used from: Out of Stock This title will be released on March 24, 2015.