A Tale of Two Further Books

Impressions of someone impressed by Abigail Thomas

One recommended book quickly led to the purchase of two books.

Janisse Ray

¹ recommended Safekeeping by Abigail Thomas to me as an excellent example of micro memoir, and when I went online to check it out, I saw another of Thomas’s books, a more traditional memoir, called, A Three Dog Life. For a few years now the fantasy of living in the woods with three dogs has sustained me through some tough days, so there was no question that book was also coming to my home.²

I read them both in three days. A rarity for me.

The copies sitting on my desk.

I brought them with me on an analog vacation in Grand Marais, Minnesota, which I took in anticipation of my fiftieth birthday. Three days of no internet, no texting, no screens, etc., etc. The agenda included only dog-walking, rock-hunting, painting, eating simply, and reading.

At the beach, while transfixed by digging through the round rocks, looking for the most beautiful ones, I found myself anxious to get back to reading Thomas. While painting, I’d be thinking about what I had read the night before, wondering how someone can put together randomness and coherence so well.

A micro memoir is a very short autobiographical essay or series of short autobiographical essays, as in the case of Thomas. Some can be as short as two sentences. Most are a couple pages. Each essay is its own self-contained story. And when placed next to other micro memoir essays, like paintings in a gallery, they tell a larger story. The whole is greater than the sum of the parts.

It’s been a few weeks since I binge-read them. I’m left with the books’ emotional imprint on me. I couldn’t tell you, without opening them again, any real specific details. But her repeated endeavors to figure out who she is—both to be herself and to be a good daughter/wife/mother/friend—stand out as a main theme. To be herself wins out, without debasing the others, which are roles filled with expectations she sometimes can fulfill and sometimes cannot. Self-reflection stabilizes Thomas’s memoirs like a retaining wall in a garden: moments of self-clarity make “the good” and “the bad” neither but rather turn them into wisdom or at least perceptive observations to converse with the future self.

Here’s an example, called, “Something Overheard.”

It was a party in what was to become SoHo, lots of drinking, lots of smoke, and something said something I didn’t catch, and another man replied, one hand on the back of his own head, the other holding a cigarette, both men wearing togas as I recall, “Oh honey, any sense of security is a false sense of security.” Everybody laughed, but I didn’t get it. I just didn’t get it. What was so funny? What did it mean?

Now I get it.

The binge-read led me to ponder, what is a memoir?^⁠³ Memoir is neither memory nor autobiography. I think a memoir is a series of memories curated, like autumn leaves carefully selected and arranged to show a rainbow or as on a painter’s palette, ready to be drawn out and mixed with a complementary memory. But a memoir is not a series memories piled up like autumn leaves waiting for a dog to jump in them and mix them up into chaos, the way memories normally behave in one’s mind.

1. The class was a beginning memoir writing course, which can be found here: https://janisseray.com/work-with-me/. It was run like a weekly fall-semester class, via Zoom, which was tolerable because the people in it and Janisse were so engaging. Janisse writes Rhizosphere on Substack.

2. Abigail Thomas, Safekeeping: Some True Stories From a Life, Anchor Books, 2000. And A Three Dog Life: A Memoir, HarperCollins, 2006.

3. I’ve read memoirs of famous folk, but rarely with satisfaction. I find memoirs of people without any celebrity much more satisfying.