Memoir is Exploration, So Keep Yourself Open: An Interview with Abigail Thomas

Like Abigail Thomas’s previous memoirs and essay collections, Still Life At Eighty: The Next Interesting Thing, is wise, reassuring, funny, and at the very same time unsettling. Thomas manages this apparent contradiction through her signature style: passionate and unwavering honesty. Nothing is off limits, and everything is examined with eager eyes and a dash of acerbic wit.

The primary subject, as her title signals, is aging, how it feels to be turning eighty, facing diminished capabilities yet also a growing understanding of what matters in an authentic, deliberate life.

Vanity Fair hails the memoir as “irreverent, wise, and boundlessly generous,” while no less than Stephen King (yes, that Stephen King) calls it “a little jewel box of a book, full of epiphanies that are comforting and merciless in the gentlest possible way.”

Brevity editor Dinty W. Moore talked recently with Abigail Thomas about the new book, about the craft of memoir, and about those things “a body remembers”:

Dinty W. Moore: You said during your virtual reading this past weekend that “If your memoir ends where you thought it was going to end, you aren’t doing it right.” Can you expand a bit on what you mean?  

Abigail Thomas: Well, first of all because there are usually surprises along the way. Leave room for them. After all, the word “memoir” comes from “memory,” and memory is a fickle creature. Unreliable. Tricky.

Writing memoir may bring ways of seeing the past from an angle that changes it a bit, moments you had forgotten that show up. If you have these surprises, maybe you are thinking of avoiding them. Don’t. Because part of the deal in memoir is having to face things you’d rather not know, especially about yourself. We all have things we’ve buried, if they appear you need to dig them up and take a look at yourself from what may be an unattractive angle.

This is called progress. You are about to learn something worth knowing. Write as honestly as you can about whatever it is. Memoir doesn’t consist of stacks of neat unalterable facts, writing memoir is a fluid messy process, there are rough patches, maybe a tsunami or two, and what you are writing might take you somewhere you hadn’t imagined.  Your original ending is now unnecessary, or too neat, or somehow leaves out everything you’ve learned along the way. Because at its best, writing memoir can lead to a clarity you’ve hungered for without even knowing it. 

DWM: In Still Life at Eighty, you tell us that “a shift in the way we look at ourselves and our lives is one of the benefits of writing memoir.” Have you experienced those benefits personally? Or to put it more directly, is your life better because you chose to share it with readers, even the grief and various personal difficulties?

AT: I think most memoir writers write first of all for ourselves, not for any specific audience. We write for our own clarity. The painful admissions, the ways in which we are upset by ourselves, our actions, things we did, things we failed to do, all of that has to be honestly faced. No point in skirting the truth. Who would we be fooling? Ourselves?

So it has to all come out and get looked at honestly. If it belongs, then it goes in the book. If not, then we’ve learned something worth knowing about our role in our own lives, and in the lives of others. It’s about clarity, which really is the best gift we could give ourselves, and as it turns out, it is useful to others

DWM: That’s one of the aspects of your new book, Still Life at Eighty, that is so wonderful, the way you process lingering guilt and feelings of dread so straightforwardly, but also celebrate with us as readers how the small, wonderful moments—a lightning bug, a feather, remembering how tiny fish swim in silver schools—demand our attention as well. I’m also taken by the way you will occasionally refer to yourself in third person—  “… her body is still remembering the kinds of things her body remembers, she needs to sit down and stay still while she waits for it to forget.” Is essaying, for you, a way to “sit down and stay still,” do you write at times to put these memories to rest?

AT: The feather! What a perfect end to that moment, it appeared and disappeared at the perfect moment. I write sometimes to put the memories to rest, and sometimes to go back to them. Because there are some griefs, some longings, that the body wants to return to, despite the pain, and writing will take me there. As for dread, it happens, it needs to be honored by recording it, but I hope it never comes back.

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Abigail Thomas is the author of many acclaimed memoirs, including A Three Dog Life, Safekeeping, and What Comes Next and How to Like It. She lives in Woodstock, New York, with her dogs.

Dinty W. Moore is the founder and editor of Brevity magazine and is likely out in his garden at this very moment.