If you’re looking for inspiration to keep those New Year’s resolutions, know that memoirist Abigail Thomas has finally quit smoking.
At age 84.
“It’s caught up with me,” admitted the New York Times-bestselling author. “Somebody once told me, ‘You smoke like a truck driver,’ and that, well, that was about 70 years ago.”
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Thomas was speaking via Zoom from the living room of her home in Woodstock, New York, on the occasion of the paperback release of “Still Life at Eighty: The Next Interesting Thing.” Told in the witty, insightful and elliptical way readers of Thomas’ well-loved works like “Safekeeping,” “A Three Dog Life” and “What Comes Next and How to Like It” have come to expect, her memoir creates a compelling meditation on aging, love, grief and finding meaning in life’s little moments. It’s also a generous guide to the craft of writing itself and full of useful advice.
The woman who writer Stephen King calls “the Emily Dickinson of memoirists” is the first to share her mistakes, foibles and downright embarrassing moments. (Let’s just say adult diapers aren’t beneath her consideration.)
“The more vulnerable you make yourself, the stronger you get because you’ve revealed something that you’ve learned something from,” Thomas said. “I remember getting a letter from somebody who said before she read that, she had felt like the worst person in the world, and now she just felt human. I don’t write for other people, but it’s awfully nice when it winds up being helpful for somebody.”
And yet more inspiration: Thomas only has a high school degree and didn’t begin a successful writing career until she was almost 50 and had raised four children.
“I honestly think if I’d gone to college I would never have become a writer, because of all those ‘No Trespassing’ signs, you know, like ‘narrative arc’ and ‘denouement’ and all that stuff which I don’t really understand,” she said.
“I had really wanted very badly to be a writer, but every time I tried I’d just crumple it up and think, ‘Who do you think you are?’ Because I thought writers had deep thoughts and interesting lives and important things to say and I didn’t have any of that.”
Never mind that thousands of her readers would argue Thomas indeed has very important — and relatable — things to say. She trains her perceptive gaze on the beauty and complexity of everyday life and examines her past to extract wisdom from it. As she writes in “Still Life,” “Here’s the thing. You can’t change the past, but if you can face it, both the present and the future will shift.”
“It’s really true,” she said in the interview. “If there’s something that crops up in a memoir you’re writing, and you don’t even want to know it about yourself but you have to put it in – because who are you fooling? Once you’ve dragged it up from the dark, facing it isn’t the end of the world.”
The thing you were afraid to face is suddenly not so scary, she says. “It’s finite, it has edges.”
Though she’s the daughter of famed physician and science writer Lewis Thomas who authored, among other books, “The Lives of a Cell,” her big break came after she saw a flyer on a kiosk advertising a local writing workshop – the kind that she has now taught at for decades.
Ironically, she would also go on to lead workshops for a while in the MFA program of The New School in New York City.
“It’s a workshop I would have been unable to join because I had no college degree, and yet I could teach it,” she said. “I found that very amusing — and it was!”
To see the complete recorded interview with Thomas, register here for the Friday, Jan. 17 episode of Bookish, the free virtual program on authors produced by the Southern California News Group. Also featured on the episode is Amy Wilson, podcaster and author of “Happy to Help: Adventures of a People Pleaser.”