What Comes Next and How to Like It
(Scribner, 2015; $24.00)
By Abigail Thomas
Long before I thought of myself as a writer, the act of writing was the gateway to my inner life. At eleven, twelve, thirteen years old, you could not have pried that pen from my hand. I wasn’t composing though (I had no readers). Filling notebook after notebook, I was surviving. For decades the only honest conversation I had was with myself in a spiral-bound journal. Thankfully, that’s all changed.
From what I’ve read in Abigail Thomas’s memoirs — there are three, and you should read them all, Safekeeping, A Three Dog Life, and her newest What Comes Next and How to Like It — I suspect she is the same sort of writer I am: She writes in an attempt to figure out who she is and to what degree the events unfolding around her will change the self she is constantly discovering. And the writing of it, how it gets written, from what direction, and in what order (or disorder), is at least half the story.
In the opening vignette to What Comes Next and How to Like It (WCNAHTLI), called “Painting, Not Writing,” Thomas refers to the story she “spent years writing and failed to turn into anything” until it turned into the book it became: “The stuff that doesn’t work has to be written to make way for the stuff that might; often you need to take the long way round…. Still, years. That’s a long time to get nowhere. The story was about a thirty-year friendship that had a hole blown through it, but somehow survived.”
And that story is the story, the main thread of WCNAHTLI: her longtime friendship with her best pal Chuck and the hole that was blown through it. And it’s about what came next. We get conversations between Abigail and Chuck about what the best approach is to telling this tale of their friendship: “Chuck started with 1979, the year we met. He came up with two sentences: ‘She was funny. So was I.’ That was it. Not much help.” And in a two-paragraph-long section called “Afraid,” Thomas writes, “I have always been half in love with Chuck, but it’s the top half. I love how his mind works.”
Thank God that Thomas is a comedienne with exquisite timing. We need her humor (and its accompanying wisdom) as we try to absorb all that happens around her: her daughter’s illness, Chuck’s illness, her son’s divorce, her other daughter’s divorce, her husband’s tragic accident and subsequent death. There is enough sadness for five families twice the size of theirs. Because that’s how life is, is what Thomas likes to remind us. Everything happens. One thing after another and then something else, and then another thing that overlaps with another. And you hope that you can live with it. Maybe even learn to like it. Or, at the very least, survive it.
In between the complications and tragedy there are pockets of love and generosity and joy. There are her dogs, who we meet, say goodbye to as they die, watch as one of them (Daphne) practically eats Thomas’s whole house: “I have found Jeffrey Eugenides, George Eliot, Alice Thomas Ellis, Clyde Edgerton, Deborah Eisenberg, all lying on the lawn with their bindings chewed.” There is also art. There are the much-needed moments when Abigail brings us with her into her garage for painting breaks: “When you paint on glass, you can razor it off,” she writes. “Halfway through scraping off a bunch of apple trees, I turned it over, and there was the painting — a ghostly stand of birch. All I had to do was enhance the accident.”
Abigail discloses just enough about her own personal troubles to make us adore her. She drinks too much and tries to quit. She smokes too much and tries to quit. She sleeps too much and tries to sleep less. She binge watches TV series. She watches a horror movie in the middle of a gorgeous spring day (“There was no escape from all this beauty, I was being force-fed a spring morning, even the oxygen was divine, so finally I went inside and watched The Exorcist.”). In other words, she is like a lot of us.
Thomas has three decades of wisdom on me (she is a mother and a grandmother and a widow) so when I read WCNAHTLI, I am not reading my own story in regard to circumstance and life station, but the ins and outs of her daily life — trying to improve, trying to appreciate the beautiful mess of life, writing about all of it — that’s where I find my connection. The book itself is full of difficulty and hilarity, a record of how comically impossible it is to figure anything out at all — which is really the only kind of record I’m interested in these days.
What Comes Next and How to Like It is available at your local independent bookseller. To find an independent bookstore near you, click here.
