Memoirs are my guilty, gossipy pleasure. They don’t offer the worthy, crunchy, authoritative examinations found in non-fiction titles bristling with footnotes. Nor do they have the license of novels to take us flying into imaginary worlds. I think of them as a hybrid, especially after encountering gaps in my own memory. “Remember him?” my husband asks, and I don’t. 

Yet in using literary techniques to examine their lives, memoirists can give us a sense of the past that can be truer than historians’ attempts at reconstruction, even if they’ve mis-remembered something or papered it over or outright lied. What was it actually like to live—wherever? Whenever? That usually comes through, and I love it.

Last time I wrote about Rona Maynard’s recent memoir, Starter Dog, and I want to return to it later. But first, two memoirs by Abigail Thomas: A Three Dog Life and a later book, What Comes Next and How to Like It. Abigail Thomas is a very different writer than the more straightforward Maynard. According to Stephen King, she’s “the Emily Dickenson of memoirists,” which sums up Thomas’s enigmatic approach to her repeated subject—her own startling life. 

The first of the memoirs I read was A Three Dog Life, her most well-known work, a New York Times bestseller published in 2006, and a moving story of loss. It centres on a terrible accident, when her husband, journalist Rich Rogin, is out walking their dog near their apartment in New York City. The leash breaks and Rogin chases the dog into traffic, where he’s hit by a car. 

Rogin suffers a catastrophic brain injury from which never recovers, his thinking left muddled and his personality changed. Equally prone to outbreaks of violence and amusing, gnomic utterances, Rogin lives for 12 years after the accident, mostly in hospitals and institutions. A Three Dog Life tells the story of Thomas’s life before and after her husband’s injury, how she tries to recover from it, and how she also can’t. One never does.

Thomas writes in broadening circles. Her story emerges elliptically as she tries to deal with her pain, shying away from addressing key aspects of her life, her marriage, the accident and its aftermath head-on, so that she reveals details out of order. 

The story that emerges is of a woman, born in 1941, who lives outside the female clichés of her times. I’ve been trying to come up with a word to describe the younger Thomas and keep thinking of “laddish,” describing a young man’s devil-may-care personality, rakish and raffish, yet one that’s indulged by society. “Girlish” is condescending and the other alternatives for women are insulting, so “laddish” will have to do. 

Working first for a publisher and then as a literary agent, Thomas drinks like a lord, smokes a pack a day, sleeps around, marries twice and gives birth to four kids. Her best friend is a man ten years younger than she is, Chuck Verrill, who follows her first into publishing and then agenting. They flirt but never have an affair. Verrill ends up getting married and having a couple of kids, but he and Thomas remain the closest of friends.

All this is background to the story of her third marriage and Rogin’s accident, coming out in by-the-ways and digressions. A Three Dog Life begins with Thomas placing a personal ad in the New York Review of Books. Rich Rogin answers, and when they meet for dinner, Thomas says it takes her five minutes to decide that he’s the nicest person in the world. (Less time to notice that he’s very handsome.) Rogin asks her to marry him thirteen days later. He’s 57, she’s 46. They’ve been married for 12 idyllic years when Rogan is hit by the car. 

“’Will you move me twenty-six thousand miles to the left?’” he asks the next day in hospital. “’Yes,’ I said, not moving from my chair. After a moment, he said ‘Thank you,’ adding in wonder, ‘I didn’t feel a thing.’”

From there, we move backward and forward erratically. Will Rogin ever be able to come home? And was their marriage, in fact, idyllic? Thomas writes that for a long time, it was. But eventually she allows that after Rogin retired, he was at such loose ends he started driving her crazy. Her few brief, reluctantly-excavated sentences reminded me of a novel I re-read recently, Semi-Detached by Cynthia Holz. As I wrote, the protagonist’s husband alternately bores and infuriates her after they retire, following her around the house reading out snatches from the newspaper and otherwise doing a whole lot of nothing. Holz’s novel explores what happens when long-time partners realize they’ve grown apart. Or at least, when one of them does. 

In Abigail Thomas’s case, she doesn’t have to. Rogin has his accident, which she eventually reveals happened because the new leash she had bought for their dog was faulty and broke. Afterward, as she tries to navigate her complicated guilt and grief, Thomas’s future is left as scrambled as her husband’s brain.

I’m going to jump to What Comes Next and How to Like It, one of Thomas’s more recent memoirs. By the time it begins, Rogin has been dead for a couple of years, and Thomas is living with three dogs, who cuddle up to her when not digging holes in the garden. She’s usually had three, and it’s easier to take care of them now that she’s living in upstate New York, not far from the last institution where her husband was cared for. Thomas moved to Woodstock in large part so she could bring Rogin home once a week, but that comforting regularity has ended. Long gone is the last bit of sense he ever made.

Shortly after the accident, Rogin tried to explain the new way he felt. “Pretend you are walking up the street with your friend. You are looking in windows. But right behind you is a man with a huge roller filled with white paint and he is painting over everywhere you’ve been, erasing everything. He erases your friend. You don’t even remember his name.”

Toward the end, he doesn’t remember Thomas, either.

What Comes Next and How to Like It touches on the aftermath of losing Rogin, and more centrally, walks around the illness of her best friend, whom she’s known for more than 40 years. Chuck Verrill has recently been diagnosed with a fatal liver disease. (It would kill him in 2022, after the memoir closes.) At the time of the memoir, Verrill is a high-leverage publishing professional who has worked with Stephen King, also for 40 years, initially as his editor and later his agent. He has also moved to Woodstock to be close to Thomas after his divorce. Important to the story is the fact they’ve never been lovers, even after she’s widowed and he’s divorced. 

Thomas’s daughter Catherine lives in Woodstock as well, the one of her four children whom Abigail writes most resembles her physically, which I think means she’s very pretty. Catherine has moved to town with her husband and children partly to keep an eye on Abigail, who eventually admits that since the accident, her day has begun with a beer, the first of many. Bottles roll around the house. She’d stopped smoking for years, but after the accident she’d started that again, too. Thomas’s memory isn’t that great anymore. Her grown kids are all on her case. Finally she admits almost by-the-way that she’s an alcoholic, and that she has to quit both drinking and smoking, although she isn’t sure she can.

That’s partly because Thomas learns that when Catherine was in her early twenties, and working at the literary agency where Chuck Verrill was a partner, she and Chuck had an affair. He was twice her age and married. That’s why Catherine was fired, which Abigail has never understood. Verrill’s wife learned about the affair and got her sacked. It’s also what led to Verrill’s divorce. No one told Abigail anything, and when she finally figures it out a few years later, she feels deeply betrayed by both Catherine and Verrill. Chuck had an affair with a daughter who looked very much the way she did when she was young. What does that mean? And what comes after this?

It’s fascinating to find something of the same answer in all three memoirs, Rona Maynard’s Starter Dog and these two books by Abigail Thomas. Between the lines it becomes clear that both women are saved by community. Dogs, too, but mainly community. In this age of loneliness and atomization, when huge issues threaten to crush us, both women find meaning in connecting with other people: ordinary people, as they eventually realize they are themselves, just like the rest of us. Both are close to their families, their grown children and grandchildren. But Maynard’s Starter Dog shows her getting to know her neighbours as well, and trying to help when their paths cross. Abigail Thomas almost haphazardly begins to teach writing classes to survivors of trauma. There’s her new community, and that’s where she, too, becomes connected to others and—importantly—of use.

Rona Maynard has written recently in her newsletter, Amazement Seeker, that her dog has been diagnosed with terminal cancer. Casey has been with her and her husband for a dozen years, still a good boy, but an elderly one now. Maynard’s post-retirement Project is ending—hopefully slowly. I have a well-loved 17-year-old cat myself who’s getting more than a little decrepit, but as long as Archie isn’t in pain, he’s going to stay with us. I wish Casey equally well. But I’m also interested to find out what style of amazement comes next for Maynard, and how she’ll manage to like it.

As Abigail Thomas and her lovely dogs soldier on.

My latest novel, Far Creek Road, is available here.