STILL LIFE AT EIGHTY

Reflections on aging from a master of the fresh and moving fragment.

“I love the word ‘fragment.’ It has a jagged quality,” Thomas announces in her latest assemblage of short vignettes, a form she first used in her much-loved memoir Safekeeping (2000). They are grouped in four sections: “Being This Old,” “Stay-at-Home Order,” “Wisteria,” and “A Few Thoughts About Writing.” If you’ve read other works on the theme, you may agree that when a writer feels compelled to squeeze a book out of “being this old,” it is not always a good thing. Thomas proves a delightful exception, offering reflections on the sedentary life she leads in Woodstock, New York, alone with her dogs, various visiting insects and creatures, and occasional drive-bys from her children and friends. Even when writing about wasps, word etymologies, using a coffee cup as an ashtray, and other random minutiae, she is always fun, smart, thoughtful, and pithy, modestly trying not to take up too much of your time. Some instances of repetition (the same writing prompt twice—on the other hand, it’s a good one) can be forgiven as can enough-already ruminations on the frustrations of lockdown, more than made up for by the myriad freshly turned phrases and pearls of existential wisdom. Though she includes a few sections recalling escapades of her halcyon youth, she’s fairly sure she’s forgotten more than she remembers and decides to “think of my failing memory as an achievement. I am finally living in the moment.” She faces the eventuality of death with frankness and a stiff upper lip, hopeful that when she does go she won’t get that “funny feeling” when you realize you’ve left the house with some important task undone. Given this fine little book, she should not.

Thomas is still smokin’—in both senses of the word!—and her candor is a gift to us all.