Customer Reviews

Safekeeping: Some True Stories from a Life

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Reading Safekeeping: Some True Stories From A Life, a memoir by Abigail Thomas, is much like being in conversation with a trusted friend - defenses aren't necessary, smiles abound, tears flow unashamedly.

The author, who established her literary mettle with three previous novels, most memorable for me, Herb's Pajamas (1998), writes close to the bone and straight from the heart as she reveals her life in a series of affecting vignettes. All of these engagingly candid sketches are short, some as brief as a paragraph. Yet, brevity adds to their luster.

Ms. Thomas's life was partially formed by the 1950's, a time when love was defined to her adolescent mind by parents who still closed their eyes when they kissed, and she thought 'We might all live happily ever after if only I could find the right man.' But she is no longer the girl who sang 'Hey Jude' everywhere as 'her prayer, her manifesto,' she is now thrice wed, the mother of four and grandmother of six.

Recalling her marriage at the age of eighteen Ms. Thomas notes, 'We were children, not meant to be married, but we did make beautiful babies.' A decade later, with three youngsters in tow, she ran away from her husband to live in the basement of her parents' New York City home.

It was some two years before she married again, this time to a bachelor of forty-six, a man who 'thought it gave a woman the upper hand if you told her you loved her.' He, the man with whom she spent thirty years and had one child, is at the center of much of Ms. Thomas's memoir as she delicately traces the arc of their relationship from love to rancor and back to love again. There was acrimony before and after their divorce. She does not remember when they became friends again, but writes of him, 'Now that nothing was expected of you, you were free to give.' She, too, gave as she cared for him during his final illness. To this day, it seems, she misses him, saying, 'It is so hard to comprehend gone.'

Safekeeping is studded with conversations between Ms. Thomas and her sister. At times the author is goaded into being more precise in her recollections. At other times, the sisters laugh, remembering their mother who 'didn't exactly spend her days in a red-checked apron plying us with little goodies,' but made sure they knew 'where Ovid was banished.' A poignant sister-to-sister encounter is a telephone conversation which ends in an argument. They both hang up, then immediately try to call each other back. 'Once upon a time anger was the final destination, but not now,' Ms. Thomas observes. 'Because we are older now, and we know what we want.'

At one point, following the break-up of her second marriage, Ms. Thomas despaired of being able to find a job because she didn't know how to do anything but fall in love. Not so. Most definitely not so. She knows what is treasure and what is dross; what to keep and what to discard. Today she teaches writing at New York City's New School. With Safekeeping, she teaches life.

- Gail Cooke

weep and laugh and most of all feel all the emotions life holds...Thomas writes______"this is not what I expected. I expected pure joy, and here are joy and sorrow mixing into the same moment." Doesn't that express so often how we feel, this book is filled with so many moments that I identified with...how can you not love a woman who writes ..the truth was she didn't keep the can opener anywhere. The can opener was wherever she'd last left it; the can opener was where she found it. Abigail Thomas reveals so much of herself in this book but even more one finds so much of theirself as well...it does leave one wanting to know even more about Thomas and her life.

After reading Getting Over Tom, An Actual Life, and Herb's Pajamas, I was thrilled to get Abigail Thomas's new book. This book is brilliantly written, revealing emotions that I before now didn't think could be expressed through written material. I highly recommend this book to anyone who has read anything by Ms. Thomas before, and to those who have not yet been introduced to this author's wonderful writing style. The book will make you laugh and may even make you cry. Ms. Thomas courageously reveals things that many people keep to themselves. I thank Ms. Thomas for sharing her life with us and writing such a wonderful book.

to read this honest, large-hearted, memoir, told in a series of short (often only a paragraph, sometimes a page) vignettes. You won't regret it. Thomas reveals a life lived fully, with all senses engaged, smell, taste, touch, in these pieces about her first marriage when she was a pregnant teenager, to a second with a much older physicist ("Dance for me while the chicken is cooking," he says to her) whom she divorces and later becomes very good friends with, to her third, happy coupling, and the children she had during them. I could not stop reading this and suspect you won't be able to either. This book makes you feel full inside.

I first read Abigail Thomas' work several years ago in the literary journal, "Glimmer Train." I never forgot those stories: smart, funny, real, brilliant. And her new book held up to that standard. I read it in one day. I just couldn't put it down. It was like a box of chocolates--I kept thinking, okay just one more...each "chapter" is very short, each packed with intelligence, grace, love. This is a great book.

As a writer and university professor of literature, I have rarely seen a new work as lovely and startling as Abigail Thomas's "Safekeeping." This raw, unsentimentalized portrait of an "average" woman -- from lost girl, mother of three, wandering barefoot through the wilds of '60s Manhattan, to secure, established, apple-cake-baking grandmother -- gorgeously rendered in short-short, wrenching, often hilarious vignettes, should top this summer's lists. Buy and read this elegant little volume, and give it away; then buy it and give it away again. "Safekeeping" is a keepsake for all time. Perfect for reading clubs -- Oprah's or yours.

Now here's a good Mother's Day present. I picked up this book because of its jacket, which shows a young woman gazing into the middle distance--perhaps the distance of her life to come. I began reading the book and couldn't put it down, the writing is so sharp and unsentimentally poignant. The perspective is that of a middle-aged grandmother whose memory is organized around the death of her second husband. Her life comes back to her the way lives really are remembered--in pieces transported by emotions of pleasure, regret, pride and shame. I felt absorbed in a life that was entirely someone else's but which had become my own. What an amazing book!

A life told in pastiche, favoring small moments of telling quietness over the Big Events that feature in most memoirs. Divorces and births are passed over with little comment, but scenes from marriages and parenthood and the friendships that persist after marriage ends are beautifully rendered.

Thomas shifts point of view, sometimes telling a piece in first person, sometimes in third. Her sister makes occasional appearances in the book, "correcting" Thomas and questioning her motives. The book jumps back and forth in time, and part of the pleasure of reading it is encountering the life in the order that makes most sense to its author, and piecing together the chronology as you go along.

Very short sections, nicely managed. Almost a collection of prose poems.

I absolutely loved this gem of a book. I found so much to relate to in Thomas's beautiful, honest descriptions of love, loss, grief and growing up. Reading it, I alternately laughed out loud and teared up. As deeply personal as the writing is, the emotions depicted in this unusual memoir are universal.

I saw Abigail Thomas read at a library bookfair in my town. She was wonderful. I bought the book and inhaled it. You will become a part of her life. Her food, her children, her parents, her husbands. Her. There is no other book like this. It stands completly alone.