A jagged peace

Some writers are squirrelly about using writing as therapy. Not Abigail Thomas. “Writing,” she once unabashedly told a group of students at the University of Iowa, “is the way I try to make sense of my life, try to find meaning in accident.” With two memoirs, one novel, two collections of short stories and two children’s books in which most of the material directly echoes her experience, it’s fair to say she has performed the literary equivalent of analysis. “Sometimes,” she has said, “just holding a pen in my hand and writing milk butter eggs sugar calms me.”

Thomas, the daughter of writer-scientist Lewis Thomas (“The Lives of a Cell”), was kicked out of Bryn Mawr College in 1959 as a first-year student. Her transgression? Becoming pregnant. Years later, this inspired her novel, “An Actual Life.” At 26, with three children (one from her first husband, two from her second), she divorced and became a single mother. After the divorce, her second husband died.

This portion of Thomas’ life was documented in the memoir “Safekeeping,” a glittering collection of fragments, tesserae and memories fashioned into a book. “My life didn’t feel like a novel,” she wrote in response to her editor’s request that she make it into one. “It felt like a million moments.” A similar aesthetic infuses her short story collections, “Herb’s Pajamas” (featuring four interlocking stories about apartment dwellers on New York’s Upper West Side, where the author, who teaches at the New School, lived for decades) and “Getting Over Tom” (which is narrated by edgy women in various stages of love trouble). Both of these efforts also draw their settings, events and characters from Thomas’ life.

Thomas’ new book, “A Three Dog Life,” is a memoir of the five years after her third husband, Rich, a retired journalist, was hit by a car on 113th Street and Riverside Drive. The accident left Rich with traumatic brain injuries -- injuries that caused short-term memory loss, dementia, anger and all manner of delusions. The ambulance report, which did not escape the writer’s eye, read, “dead, or likely to die.”

“This is the one thing that stays the same,” the book begins: “my husband got hurt.” In the ensuing pages, Thomas dances back and forth, in and around the accident, examining her life and how it has changed. “I’m bored by chronology,” she has written elsewhere. “I don’t believe in chronology. Time is too weird.” Here, then -- as in “Safekeeping” -- she uses fragmentation as a coping mechanism and a literary strategy.

When friends ask how she’s managing, she answers, simply, “This is the path our lives have taken.” Two years after the accident, she reflects: “Time has gotten skewed, as tangled as fish line.” Every carefully created routine is shattered, as Thomas must literally construct a new life. “I miss my husband,” she writes. “I miss the comfort of living with this man I loved and trusted absolutely.” And although she spends very little time looking at the past, memories of the 13 years they spent together before the accident do bubble up. “The past is not as interesting to me now as it was when I was young, and it would certainly come up,” she observes. “There’s nothing I want to relive -- certainly not youth -- and as for what’s to come, I’m in no hurry. I watch my dogs.”

For Thomas, the dogs are essential: a way of finding solace, of remaining connected, a key part of her recovery. She writes fondly of nights spent with them curled up in bed beside her, insisting that, to banish melancholy, you need not one or two, but three. (The concept, and the book’s title, is explained in an epigraph from Wikipedia: “Australian Aborigines slept with their dogs for warmth on cold nights, the coldest being a ‘three dog night.’ ”) Harry, the beagle that Rich chased into the street the night of the accident, is the first. Thomas feels no animosity for Harry, only love and tenderness. “I don’t find it ironic,” she claims, “that the very reason Rich got hurt is the creature who comforts me. There is no irony here, no room for guilt or second-guessing. That would be a diversion, and indulgence.” After the accident, she adopts Rosie -- half dachshund, half whippet -- to entertain Harry, and later brings home Carolina Bones, another “kind of beagle,” to play with Rosie when Harry becomes sedentary.

Eventually, Thomas leaves her Upper West Side apartment and buys a house close to Woodstock, N.Y., to be near the nursing facility she has found, after much agonizing, for her husband. She is filled with survivor’s guilt, enormous guilt that she did not bring him home. In the meantime, though, she puts “a life together with my family and friends and dogs.” Rich is not neglected; she visits frequently and brings him home with her for days at a time. (Often on these visits he has no idea where he is.) Even in the midst of this tragedy, she finds herself making small, glancing progress toward something that looks a little bit like joy. “How dare you,” she asks herself, surprised at her own happiness. “You built this on tragedy.”

What is life like? A reader can’t help asking as she reads Thomas’ uncluttered and willfully honest prose. Is it one step, two step? Or is it one step, look up, two step? The future “is no longer my destination,” Thomas writes. “When I was young the future was where all the good stuff was kept, the party clothes, the pretty china, the family silver, the grown-up jobs. The future was a land of its own, and we couldn’t wait to get there.”

In the course of this memoir, Thomas is left squarely in the moment. This landing is all the more resounding because she has held the moment, the unchanging thing, in her hand and looked at it from all angles. “[M]y husband got hurt,” she writes, and the clarity is stunning. This is writing that is truer to the way the human mind works and lives and organizes material than writing that is organized by Manichean principles like past and future; before and after; happy and unhappy; right and wrong. Life gives us new information every second. We walk around, not through it. *