What Comes Next and How to Like It

Thomas is a writer who got a late start before blazing trails with her memoirs, written in spare and evocative prose.

Stephen King calls her the “Emily Dickinson of memoirists” and noted that “so much of this book’s wisdom is written between the lines and in the white spaces.” She writes about troubled friendships, the gems she finds each day in the mundane, and the unavoidable pains of growing old. Her understated style is searing and inimitable.

This book and her earlier memoir Safekeeping made me hopeful that my writing style can keep improving even in my sixties and beyond.

Unorthodox ways of living and loving appeal to me… in literature and in life. When I found Abigail Thomas in the year following my husband’s death, I felt I’d found a new friend. Thomas’s husband’s brain damage following an accident must have been a nightmare. Living for years with his rage and cognitive lapses must have taken every bit of her courage and resilience. When he died, Thomas was forced, as I was, to pick up and carry on with her life. Is there to be pleasure again? Or has this lifetime’s allotment of joy been used up? These were… show more.