A Conversation with Abigail Thomas

This month features my conversation with Abigail Thomas, whom Stephen King refers to as the "Emily Dickinson of memoirists." It was wonderful to have many of you there for this live event where she invited us into her home and her creative process, offering a rare and unvarnished peek into how she thinks about memoir; also reading from her latest book Still Life at 80: The Next Interesting Thing.

I am sharing an abridged version of the interview below, in written form, and have also posted the video replay for you to watch in case you missed it.

Be sure to check out the upcoming live author events.

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Abigail Thomas worked as both a book editor and book agent before writing her own first collection of short stories, Getting Over Tom. Her second and third books, An Actual Life and Herb’s Pajamas, were works of fiction.

Thomas’ memoir, A Three Dog Life, was named one of the best books of 2006 by The Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post, and received the 2006 Inspirational Memoir Award given by Books for A Better Life.

She is also author of the memoirs Safekeeping, Thinking About Memoir and What Comes Next and How to Like It.

In her new book, Still Life at 80, Thomas ruminates on aging during the confines of COVID-19 with her trademark mix of humor and wisdom, including valuable, contemplative writing tips along the way.

She lives in Woodstock, New York.

To learn more about Abigail Thomas, visit her site.

KARIN GUTMAN:  In all the things you’ve written, you seem to write little about your childhood. How do you think the way you were brought up shaped you?
 
ABIGAIL THOMAS:  My father [Lewis Thomas] wrote poetry in the 30s and 40s, which the Atlantic published, and I loved his poems. But he didn’t really start writing for the New England Journal of Medicine until the 70s. If he was excited about something, there would be a tremble and tremor in his voice as he talked about something I had no understanding of, and I thought to myself, That’s the way I want to live, I want to live on the verge, just where he is right now… you don’t know what’s going to happen but you know it’s going to be good. And that is what writing does for all of us, I think. You wake up in gear and you can’t wait to see where you are, where you’ve been, and where you’re going, because you don’t know half the time where you’re going.
 
KARIN:  In the process of writing memoir, you talk about going into the basement and pulling out what’s down there and raising it up to the light. What do you mean by that?
 
ABIGAIL:  Well, it has all its power in the dark, and when you bring it up to the light, you see that it has edges and it’s finite. You look at it really closely—the parts of you you’d rather not know or talk about, but we all have them in all aspects of our lives. It’s so much easier to bring them up and write about them and achieve a kind of clarity that we’re all hungering for, whether we know it or not. It’s a way of putting it somewhere else. And it’s also having control over it. Nobody can sneak up behind you and say, “I know what you did…” I’ve already told you what I did.
 
KARIN:  What does it mean to put it somewhere else?
 
ABIGAIL:  You put it in writing, and it’s no longer in you. It isn’t buried in you somewhere. You’ve made something out of it. You’ve made something different and separate out of it. It’s helpful. You find it easier to forgive yourself for things you don’t even want to admit to. It doesn’t mean everything has to go into the book you’re writing, but it is important to take a look. Who are you kidding if you don’t. It is memoir.
 
I think when you’re writing memoir, if you wind up where you thought you were going to wind up, you probably haven’t looked hard enough. You have to make room for the surprises. It saves lives. It makes all the difference in the world.
 
KARIN:  How does writing memoir save lives?
 
ABIGAIL:  When Rich got hit [by a car]… that’s the only memoir I wrote chronologically as it was happening. I don’t know how I would have gotten through any of that if I weren’t writing it down—where I was, what I was doing, whether I was in the dog park or the lunch room where he was. That saved us both, I think. If you write it... it doesn’t really make sense... but it fits together somehow. I don’t know how else to say that. When you’re going through a real crisis, to keep track of it is better than just being lost, just losing yourself in it.
 
KARIN:  You've written about your aversion to the term narrative arc. How would you define what a story is?
 
ABIGAIL:  Well, I can tell you what I don’t like. I don’t like anything approaching perfection. I don’t like anything neat and tidy. I like a big mess. I like to write in the first person and the third person, and sometimes the second person. When I make things out of clay, I like things rough as though somebody just barely put this together, and I think that must have something to do with the way I write. I don’t know how to answer this except that I like a bit of a mess. I don’t like everything standing straight with its hair combed and its teeth brushed and its buttons all buttoned. The word curiosity is in my head. I want somebody to be curious to see what she’s going to do next, although I never really thought of that before. I want to be curious to see what I do next, and that produces whichever direction I’m going in.
 
Gosh, I wish I knew how to think about this.
 
KARIN:  Well, it’s asking you to analyze your own work, which I suppose takes away from the experience of it.
 
ABIGAIL:  It’s just hard, because my mind doesn’t work that way. I’m not good at analyzing. I think that’s because I didn’t go back to college. Oh well. I can’t do it.
 
KARIN:  You’re giving a good advertisement for not going to school.
 
ABIGAIL:  I don’t think you need school to be a writer. In fact, I think you need to forget everything you learned when you sit down to start—not know where you’re going or have some vague idea.
 
KARIN:  I know you spent some time in publishing. How did that influence you? It’s interesting that you didn’t arrive to the page yourself as a writer until your late 40s, and yet you were around it and it was accessible.
 
ABIGAIL:  It was extremely helpful. I remember getting a book—it was called French Dirt by Robert Goodman. It's still in print. The book wasn't very good, but the little thing in the very front, which was his discussion of what this book would be about, was really good. I learned that if you pay attention and make suggestions, you can get a really good book out of a writer who hasn’t yet written a really good book because you saw 12 sentences that were really good, when he was paying attention. I learned that a writer with spark, or some kind of talent, could get better.
 
I spent an awfully long time crumpling things up and tossing them across the room, saying, Who do you think you are? Because I thought you had to know something and that it had to be important and deep. But no, you just have to start.
 
Anyway, that's what I learned in publishing. I loved it until they made me an assistant editor, and then I realized I'd really have to know what I was talking about. If I loved a book, I would have to speak for whether it made any money or not. So I quit.
 
KARIN:  Do you think about your audience or are you writing purely for yourself?
 
ABIGAIL:  I am writing purely for myself. I'm writing for clarity and I'm writing for fun. And I'm writing to see what the hell the back of my mind is thinking when the front of my mind is doing nothing. It’s just so interesting… The smallest detail can take you someplace. You can write 15 or 20 or 500 pages of it, and then you get to the first sentence of what you're really going to write. So nothing is ever wasted.
 
KARIN:  What do you do when you’re stuck?
 
ABIGAIL: I had a lot of trouble with the beginning of What Comes Next and How to Like It. I’d gotten the whole book ready, but I couldn't find a way to start it. I tried it every which way until suddenly I began to write I can't write this… I can't do this… This is impossible. Then I wrote about what I was doing instead of writing, which was painting, and that segued right into the book. So sometimes, if you're having trouble, just stare at it and say, I hate writing this. I don't want to write this. This is too hard. These are the following 12 reasons why this is too hard. I'm just going to stomp my foot and eat chocolate cake forever… And then you might find that you've gotten yourself right into the book.
 
KARIN:  Do you find moving between creative mediums helpful?
 
ABIGAIL:  It's nice to have something else to do. And the clay is so sensual, which is what I'm doing now. The clay has a mind of its own. You can't boss it around. You can't boss writing around either. But you really can't force the clay and that's interesting and fun and makes for something else to put in whatever you're writing. I’ve done a whole little thing about clay.
 
I think we're supposed to make things with our thumbs and imaginations. Otherwise, it's just shopping, which can be very creative, but I think that's what a lot of this country has turned to use as a creative outlet. There are more interesting things to do.
 
KARIN:  You've watched memoir evolve over the years. What's your perspective on it? I know it's your preferred genre to write in.
 
ABIGAIL:  I love that it wasn't just a fad that disappeared. People kept saying, “This is going to be over within a year's time. Don't bother.” I love that we're curious about other peoples’ lives and that people are willing to write about them. It's been a while since I could read anything of any great length that wasn't written by a student. So, it's hard for me to talk about what memoir is like nowadays. I just love that it's still alive, that it's just as vital an artform as ever, more so probably.
 
KARIN:  What do you think that it says about the age we’re living in and us as a people?
 
ABIGAIL:  I just hope that we’re curious about each other and interested in each other and need help from each other. All of those things can be satisfied in a memoir. You can read about somebody who has experienced something that you've experienced. It helps, I think.
 
KARIN: Thank you, Abby. I think we'll all do a little bit of writing today.
 
ABIGAIL: Oh, please do! You can start with the line, “This is a lie I've told before.” Of course, maybe nobody lied. And you can send it to me when you're done.



Watch the full interview and video replay.

Buy the book

To learn more about Abigail Thomas, visit her site.

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A Conversation with Sari Botton

There are a few women on my radar who are spearheading a reinvention of the way we talk about personal narrative and memoir—and Sari Botton is one of them. She is a seasoned editor and the author of the memoir And You May Find Yourself... Confessions of a Late-Blooming Gen-X Weirdo.

In our conversation below, we discuss everything from the ethics of memoir and how to navigate writing about other people to how different editors define what an essay is. She raises some revolutionary points about owning our stories and the kind of language we permit ourselves to use in describing them.

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SARI BOTTON is the author of the memoir-in-essays, And You May Find Yourself...Confessions of a Late-Blooming Gen-X Weirdo. She is a contributing editor and columnist at Catapult, the former Essays Editor for Longreads, and a former columnist for the Rumpus, where she interviewed established and new writers from Cheryl Strayed to Samantha Irby.

Sari edited the New York Times-bestselling Goodbye to All That: Writers on Loving and Leaving New York and Never Can Say Goodbye: Writers on Their Unshakable Love for New York. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, New York Magazine, the Village Voice, Harper's Bazaar, Marie Claire, More, and the Rumpus.

In addition to teaching creative nonfiction at Bay Path University and Catapult, Sari is the publisher and editor of three Substack publications: Oldster Magazine, Adventures in Journalism, and Memoir Monday

KARIN GUTMAN: You’ve written about how you’ve navigated writing about other people, as well as interviewing authors about this thorny topic in your Rumpus column Conversations with Writers Braver Than Me.
 
How did you handle this issue with your memoir And You May Find Yourself?
 
SARI BOTTON: When it came time to actually write my book, I realized I needed to first write a vomit draft, what I call a ‘warts and all’ vomit draft with everything in it. All the bad stuff. And then once it was out of my body, out of my head on the page, only then could I blur, subtract and edit.
 
I did it. I handed in the book. That book was edited.
 
And then I went back to my editor, and I said, You know what? I have to do that again. I’ve got to do another level of extraction. I said, I'm not going to get to publish my book in 2021. It's going to be 2022. And she said, Fine. So, I went back and scrubbed it of any unnecessary, inflammatory details. I further blurred people. 
 
KARIN:  Do you feel like these changes diluted the story at all?
 
SARI:  It's still to me all true. I changed so many identifying characteristics. I really did my best to make it so that if one of these awful people who I dated read it, they'd know it was them but nobody else would know unless they already knew the story. I tended to only change your name if you were a jerk. I showed the people I care about the pieces they were in, and said, Is this okay with you? How do you want me to refer to you? Do you want me to change your name?
 
KARIN:  The ethics of memoir are deeply personal. Given how challenging these lines are for you, did you ever consider fictionalizing your story?
 
SARI:  You should write fiction because you're interested in fiction and the art and mechanics of it, not because you're trying to avoid getting in trouble for writing about your life. People will see right through that. I have an idea for a novel and a list of ideas for short stories. But I want to do those things because I want to play God with characters who do interesting things, not because I want to write a story about my relationship with people in my life in a way that they will not recognize themselves, because that's impossible.
 
KARIN:  What about a pseudonym?
 
SARI:  I created a pseudonym for myself. She has a Gmail and a Twitter account. There were a few reasons I didn't publish under that name. One is that I would be really pissed off; I have spent more than 30 years building my platform. For me to then have to hide behind a pseudonym and build that pseudonym’s platform… I wasn't up for that. There’s just something about needing to own my personal story.
 
KARIN:  Can you give an example of how you handled some of the more incendiary material?
 
SARI:  There's a piece in the book about my struggle with body image and weight and eating disorders. In the ‘warts and all’ vomit draft version, a relative makes a comment on my butt when I'm seven, and it completely traumatizes me.
 
I revised that chapter to say that “the adults around me” were really to blame. I realized that my babysitters were on diets. My teachers were on diets and made comments about their bodies and other kids’ bodies. My aunts, my uncles. My grandparents were on the Pritikin Diet, and we all knew about it. It really was the culture. 
 
So, I pulled back on my book to the point where I could make the stories, especially the most difficult ones, about cultural phenomena. Yeah, that relative was a big part of it, but it wasn't necessary for this particular story.
 
KARIN:  In the introduction you write that the purpose of this book is to say simply, “I was here, I lived.” I found that refreshing.
 
You also refer to the series of essays as “confessional” which I find can be used to describe memoir in a derogatory way. What does that word mean to you?
 
SARI:  A lot of the rules of memoir, and of all writing, were written by straight white men.
 
I just read one of Annie Ernaux’s books, and it was 60 pages. She calls herself an “Ethnographer of the Self.” I love that she won the Nobel Prize for that work, and I am all for ethnography of the self.
 
I think we need to be rewriting all the rules of all writing, including memoir and essays. I reject the idea that you can't be a victim. Roxane Gay has written about this in her memoir, Hunger: “It took a long time, but I prefer 'victim' to 'survivor' now. I don't want to diminish the gravity of what happened. I don't want to pretend I'm on some triumphant, uplifting journey. I don't want to pretend that everything is okay. I'm living with what happened, moving forward without forgetting, moving forward without pretending I am unscarred.”
 
I just had an argument the other day with a writer whom I love. She says, “There are no victims in essay and memoir.” I was like, “Yeah, we're rewriting those rules. I mean, there are victims.” 
 
I was in a writing group with some people and I stopped being in the writing group, because I wrote a story about something that happened to me when I was seven. And someone said, “You sound like a victim.” And then someone else was like, “Yeah, you don't want to sound like a victim.” I said, “I was seven. I was a victim.” Bullies have made all the rules. Bullies don't want to read victimization stories, but other victims do. 
 
When I was at Longreads, I wrote a blog post about how Elizabeth Wurtzel made it okay to write ‘Ouch’. I feel very strongly that when you've been hurt, it's okay to write ‘Ouch’. I hate false bravado.
 
I also like confessions. The reason I chose to call these confessions instead of essays is because some of the pieces in the book don't really rise to the standards of an essay collection. This is a memoir in episodes, in vignettes. I'm confessing to things that I haven't been allowed to say, that I've wanted to say, that aren't all flattering. And so, I call them confessions.
 
KARIN: You have devoted your career to personal narrative, both as a writer and as an editor.
 
SARI:  It's absolutely true. I've been involved in this since 1991.
 
KARIN:  You’ve been witness to the whole trajectory since the memoir boom of the 90s. Where do you think things are headed? 
 
SARI:  Early on, there was Prozac Nation. There was The Liar's Club. There was Angela's Ashes. There was The Kiss, Kathryn Harrison's memoir about her affair with her father. That was the beginning of the 90s memoir boom. 
 
It's been a boom bust, boom bust kind of thing.
 
Where it's headed is more previously marginalized voices are being shared. I've noticed a lot of memoirs that are written in fragments. Maggie Smith has one coming out. She's a poet. Abigail Thomas writes in fragments. It feels like she's always been writing in fragments from her first memoir, Safekeeping.
 
I tend to think unless your memoir is about a very specific turn of events, a straight narrative can be really boring because the connective tissue in between the important points in your life can make it blah.
 
I'm just finishing this memoir, which I absolutely love by Kimberly Harrington, But You Seemed So Happy. It's about the dissolution of her marriage. She alternates personal essays with humor essays, like she would have in McSweeney's or Shouts and Murmurs in the New Yorker. It's all about her marriage, but it's broken up. I've been more drawn toward episodic memoirs.
 
KARIN:  More like a memoir-in-essays?
 
SARI:  Yes. The ‘essay’ term is very broad. I have a larger understanding of what a personal essay is, but there are people who are sticklers.
 
KARIN:  What does it mean to fit the standards of an essay?
 
SARI:  I've worked with colleagues who feel very strongly that a personal essay needs to have a real argument in it.
 
KARIN:  What does that mean exactly?
 
SARI:  You're making a point with the essay, you're not just telling a story. I like to let the reader figure out what the point is. A lot of publications require an essay to have at its center an argument that you then back up with data and sources, even if it's just a very personal story.
 
I wrote an op-ed for The New York Times about when I got hit by a car. I was so stunned that people in New York were so helpful to me. The editors wanted me to bring in another instance in which somebody was hit by a car and not treated the same way as me. Also, to bring in statistics. Now that's an op-ed which is a different kind of essay, but there are editors at a lot of publications that want you to do that. With a personal essay, they want you to use your anecdote to illustrate a point. By my standards, the pieces in my book are personal essays, but again, I have a much broader definition than some editors.
 
KARIN:  What about Modern Love?
 
SARI:  I think they look for the Modern Love piece to really have a point at the center of it, even if it's not spelled out. Whereas some of mine are more like light anecdotes.
 
KARIN:  But I imagine that you, as an editor of essays, would want to know Why are you telling me this?
 
SARI:  That has to be inherent, but it doesn't have to be spelled out.
 
KARIN:  What is the difference between a long-form essay and a shorter form essay? Other than the length?
 
SARI:  My second Modern Love is 1,500 or 1,600 words, but there's a 5,000-word version of it in the book. I first wrote the 5,000-word version long before I had a book deal. I struggled to sell it and then I thought, I’ll try and do a Modern Love version. I did, and I sold it.
 
Some of it has to do with where you want to publish it. A great exercise is to have different versions of your piece that can go in different places and also amplify different aspects of the same story. 
 
It's harder to publish long-form right now. There are fewer and fewer venues. These days, Longreads is primarily a curation site with occasional long-form personal essays; where I used to publish three a week, they're now publishing maybe one a month. And Catapult just folded. It's hard to publish a 5,000-word essay, unless it's in your book. So, it might be worth your while to come up with a 1,200-word version for the Washington Post or the Huffington Post—a shorter version that could maybe even help you get a book deal, and then you put the longer version in the book.
 
KARIN:  What is your advice to writers who have a story they’re feeling reluctant to tell?
 
SARI:  I encourage you to write the version that you can't publish first. There's something valuable in getting it out of your head and out of your body. Something happens when it's a secret in your body, you don't have any perspective on it. And you can't until you get it out of your body and onto the page where you can see it. 
 
Then once it’s out of your body, take a break from it. Give yourself a couple of weeks, then come back to it. Let yourself have the experience of having it out of your body. There's something that happens in that early draft, some kind of neurological thing that permits you to gain perspective, that you can't have when it's just this thing you're not allowed to tell.



Buy the book

To learn more about Sari Botton visit her site.

See all interviews

Oldster Magazine explores what it means to travel through time in a human body—of any gender, at every phase of life. It focuses on the good, the bad, and the ugly we experience with each milestone, starting early in life. It’s about the experience of getting older, and what that means at different junctures.

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Adventures in Journalism features the highlights and lowlights* (*mostly lowlights) from one Gen X lady writer's rather circuitous career path.

Looking for a quick route toward success as a writer? Allow Sari Botton to demonstrate what not to do, over the course of 30-plus hilarity-(in hindsight)-filled years.

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Each week, the editors of certain literary publications select their very favorite new personal essay or memoir piece, and you can find them all collected in the Memoir Monday newsletter—along with details about upcoming readings.

Inside features: First Person Singular features original published essays, and The Lit Lab offers perspectives on craft, publishing, publicity, and more.