Safekeeping

Abigail Thomas likes to say that she didn’t know what she was doing when she set out to write Safekeeping. Memories returned and she wrote them down. Sometimes she wrote of herself in first person. Sometimes in second. Sometimes in third. Sometimes she wrote of apple cake, and of people she loved, and of unsustainable loss. No one remembers their entire life in systematic order. Few lives conform to outlines. That is why Thomas needed to invent the shape of her memoir in essays—to arrange all of its idiosyncratic pieces into an utterly compelling idiosyncratic whole.

As someone who teaches memoir writing for a living, I’ve read a lot of memoirs. Safekeeping is my all-time favorite. Each semester I assign it to my students, thinking this time I will finally grow tired of it. But I never do. To me, this book is the pinnacle of the memoir genre and I think it should get more attention as a masterpiece. While it has an unconventional, non-linear structure with multiple points of view (sometimes written in first person, sometimes in third, sometimes as an epistolary address to Thomas’s deceased second husband, sometimes as a meta-conversation about the… show more.