Reading in Small Chunks, Taking in Big Wisdom from Abigail Thomas's New Memoir

I've been a fan of Abigail Thomas since I first read her memoir A Three Dog Life (2006), and then immediately looked back and read her previous memoir, Safekeeping, which broke so many memoir writing "rules" when it first appeared in 2000.

I also appreciate what Thomas puts up on her website as craft advice and writing exercises that have helped many creative nonfiction writers. I've sent a bunch of students over there, and the result is always that they come back to me with some version of, "I tried X, and wrote something I never thought about before…" usually followed by some excited version of what they plan to do with their new material, and newly acquired skill or craft idea.

I dove into her newest memoir, What Comes Next and How to Like it (2015) months ago, then it was lost (along with a few other just-started-reading books) to the clutter of my office, and when it resurfaced a few weeks ago, I brought  it to the beach. That was the perfect environment for a book in segmented form; some chapters were no more than a single sentence, others ran for a handful of pages. I typically love such quilted work.

But selfishly, I found myself wishing this time to have not quite so many stops and starts. Thomas is able to build such depth and momentum in each richly constructed short section that I simply craved for each one to keep going, on and on. Though when I considered that so many of the mini-chapters could have been entire books in themselves, I realized perhaps that only further cemented Thomas's wisdom and skill in terms of structure, organization, and presentation. What's left out matters so much. Leave the readers wanting more, always!

Most of the time when I read, I have nearby a pad of tiny sticky page markers. I use them to bookmark lines I keep returning to, passages I want to read again and again to try to figure out the writer's craft decisions, or just places where the prose sounds lovely or says something interesting which I want to share with someone, sometime.

Here are a few:

In "Bad Memory," when writing about growing older and gaining weight: "…it looks as if I have an open umbrella concealed under my skirt. How did that happen? I think, oh well, I was young once and slender and pretty and I made the most of it. It's somebody else's turn now."

(I might simply say, "Ditto" but that would make me look old.)

In "Sleeping With Dogs," on why, at approaching 70ish, she prefers being single, and the company of dogs: "Lots of people on my somewhat leaky boat are on the lookout for a human companion. Not me. I have learned to love the inside of my own head. There isn't much I'd rather say then think."

(No dogs for me, and I love the clatter of family, but when they're all away for hours or a day—I quickly retreat to that place in my head where I can think and not talk.)

In "Mindfulness," Thomas notices the gift of a broken dishwasher: "…there are always dishes in the sink anyway, and now I am going to wash them as they appear. It is a contemplative activity. Here is the Fire King golden cup from the set my daughter Jennifer gave me. Here is the big mug my daughter Catherine uses for her tea when she drops by. Here is last night's cast-iron pan with the remnants of a roast chicken…."

This last hit me personally because our dishwasher was declared too expensive to fix last October, and we've all—me, husband, both sons—have been washing dishes ever since, and though we each mildly complain about it, I've noticed similar advantages. Sometimes it keeps more than one us in the kitchen longer after a meal, talking, joking. One son says it's very calming, he likes the sounds of the water. The other plugs in his iPod and nods and sings along and shuffles a little dance at the sink. When alone, I wash slowly, steal glimpses straight ahead out through the back window, and think. Or write in my head too. Or go over beautifully crafted writing I've recently read. Which is what I did yesterday, and why I am writing about Abigail Thomas today.

p.s. If you are a visual artist as well as a writer/reader, you're really going to like What Comes Next, which also offers thoughts, misgivings, excitement, and pleasure about the author's forays into painting.

Images:  Washing dishes - Flickr/Creative Commons - Jenny Downing; 

Guest Blogger Lisa Catherine Harper on revisions and her new book, A Double Life, Discovering Motherhood

A few weeks ago, while prepping an online lecture on the tangled topic of writing about people we know and love (or have known and loved), Lisa Harper pointed me to a post she'd written for the Poetry Foundation blog. In that post, she describes discovering she was the subject of several poems in a book by a former lover. Lisa teaches in the University of San Francisco's MFA program, and in more of the writer community coincidences I love, Lisa grew up only a few miles from where I live and has written a new book about motherhood (a favorite writing subject of mine).

Please welcome Lisa Catherine Harper.

A Double Life, Discovering Motherhood, tells my personal story against the backdrop of science, focusing on how the physical changes of motherhood give rise to its profound emotional and psychological transformations. The book was informed equally by personal experience and the kind of research available only in medical textbooks and journals.

From the get-go, I aimed to write a nonfiction narrative about motherhood which looked beyond a personal story to something universal. But this posed problems for some agents and editors who told me it was “too quiet”; neither “self-help” nor “straightforward personal narrative.”

My book didn’t focus simply on pregnancy or on baby’s first year, but spanned the period of tumultuous change between conception and my daughter’s first nine months—a time that defined for me my transition to motherhood. Editors didn’t know what to do with the book, how to sell it, or where it would find its home in bookstores. I responded by working hard on two aspects of my manuscript: 1) Dramatizing the personal story; and 2) Ensuring the research emerged organically from the narrative.

To bring out the narrative I added more scene, increased the use of direct dialogue, and made setting more vivid. I also included significant character development of my husband. Early readers had asked for that, and I responded, and the result has been constant feedback about how much my readers now appreciate his presence. I cut whole chapters that didn’t relate to the larger story of change, and I completely rewrote a few that were cast in more lyric modes—which were lovely on their own but defied the structure of the book.

To integrate the research I worked very hard to translate medical language for a lay reader. Right up through the copyediting stage my editor and I continued to make sure the tone, diction, voice, and syntax of the medical language was consistent with the story. Also—I cut details and facts that, while interesting, did not have direct bearing on the story. So there was significant development, refining, and cutting, as well as some structural revision.

The passage that follows is a good example of a strategy that I urge my students to employ: the speedy anecdote, which is a summary that has the force of scene. The lists of food came later, and both were a way for me to show just how greedily and omnivorously hungry nursing made me. In the passage I try to move swiftly through a period of time that lasted a few weeks, but to give the episode immediate and urgent presence through the details (sweat soaked bedclothes, the showers, the lists of food.)

The medical passage is a good example of one which made use of more graceful transitions (During this period…after birth) and more straightforward syntax than you might find in a medical text. In the passage, I cast the list of facts so that it tells the physical story about what happens in during this difficult postpartum time. In fact, this material was gathered from several different chapters of the texts I worked with, then synthesized into one cohesive “story.”

My persistence paid off: my book won the 2010 River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Prize, found a home at Bison Books/University of Nebraska Press, and has been praised by Publishers Weekly as “universal, moving, and relevant.”

Below is a passage from “The Fourth Trimester,” which moves from story to research then back to story as it explores those impossibly hard first postpartum weeks.

After the pain [of labor], after the bone soaking fatigue, came the hunger. No one had prepared me for this. No one had warned me just how hungry I would become in the days after I gave birth. Even as the fluid left my body through urine and sweat—a horrible, cold sweat that soaked the bedclothes and necessitated two or three showers and two or three changes of pajamas each night—the milking left me ravenous, as if my stomach had been emptied along with my breast of every scrap of food and nutrient it might have possessed in reserve. I could never eat enough. Every few hours my blood sugar dropped precipitously, and it was all I could do to load myself with calories. I ate handfuls of nuts, chocolate, dried fruit, crackers, cheese, olives, meats, antipasto vegetables, cold pasta, cold pizza, salads gifted by friends. I was grateful to the point of speechlessness for the food my friends had dropped off, because even the ready-to-eat meals I had stored in our freezer took too much energy to prepare. Truly, it took Herculean effort to defrost and reheat and serve. Then, on day three of Ella’s life, an enormous, cement-heavy box arrived via FedEx from New York. I sliced it open and revealed a half dozen cheeses, olives, artichokes, flatbread, a loaf of dark rye, dolmas, roasted peppers, black olive tapenade, marinated mushrooms all slick with green olive oil and pungent with vinegar, and a large box of buttery, orange shortbread. Ravenous, I gazed at the bounty and wept. It was exactly what I needed. I could hardly believe my friend’s goodness. We ate our fill, and then, like the loaves and the fishes, the food sustained us for many days.

The first six weeks postpartum, often referred to as the fourth trimester, is a deceptively arduous time. During this period, the mother’s body must reverse all of the processes of pregnancy. Every system of her body, not simply her reproductive organs—from respiratory to gastrointestinal to hematologic to neuromuscular—has undergone dramatic physiological change in order to assume the additional functions and capacities of pregnancy. After birth, the mother’s blood volume, which has grown 30 to 50 percent, by up to a liter and a half, must decrease to pre-pregnancy levels. Her heart rate, which has increased progressively over the pregnancy until it beats fifteen to twenty times more per minute, will slow. The concentration of thyroid hormones, which have been elevated in order to support the altered metabolism of carbohydrates, proteins, and lipids, must return to normal. Placental hormones, like estrogen and progesterone, diminish rapidly. The mother’s uterus must shrink and resume its proper relation to the rest of her abdominal organs. The cervix, bruised and distended from delivery, must heal, or “form up” and shorten. The site of placental attachment also must heal (which it does, amazingly, without scarring). And, of course, breasts, under the influence of two powerful hormones, prolactin and oxytocin, must undergo the final transitions that will enable lactation. This is only the best case scenario: there are many complications—from surgery to depression to placental retention–that can make recovery even more arduous.

And then, there is the practical matter of the baby.

Notes from Lisa (Romeo): To learn more, visit Lisa Harper's website and watch the cool (and short) video book trailer. Her book is now available for pre-order. You can also follow Lisa Harper on Twitter.

If you'd like to win a free, signed copy of A Double Life, Discovering Motherhood, please leave a comment on this post by midnight, March 21 (must have a U.S. postal address). One commenter will be chosen at random.