Monday, December 28, 2015

What Comes Next, & How to Like It, by Abigail Thomas, writer extraordinaire!

From Abigail Thomas's book:

When trying to write a novel, she turns to her best friend (who is the loose theme throughout these stories of life, art, writing, service, family, nature, dogs, and creativity):

'It seems to me,' he e-mailed me later, 'that you start out with what you know or what you think you know and you work within those 'truthful' boundaries until you reach some sort of wilderness of not knowing, and then you find a way through until you see an end , or you find a way through until you find the end that you've already seen.  It can work either way:  running away from the truth, or running out of it.'

I love this, but fear only another writer would get it.

And from her daughter Jennifer's blog, re her behavior at the Gorgeous Sandwich Man's Shop:
'Even when there's no interest on either side, one's coordination completely disappears in the presence of beauty.'
(comma mine; excuse my anal need to copy edit!)

And on sleeping all the time:  it's 'Just the simple desire to be not living one's life.'
Whoo, do I get that!

And perhaps my favorite entry (out of many, many contenders):

'Yesterday, May first, there was too much green and pink and yellow.  There was no escaping the loveliness, the delicacy.  Beauty assaulted me on every front -- forsythia, like a breaking wave, no, a tsunami of yellow; the old magnolia exploding into pink and white, like grenades; blue sky -- there was no escape from all this beauty, I was being force-fed a spring morning, even the oxygen was divine, so finally I went inside and watched The Exorcist.'

Because beauty HURTS!  We get that in other people, but sometimes just a sunset, a moonrise, the wild riot of leaves in the fall, dragonflies flittering magically about, my lynx-like cat with eyes like pools of jade, hidden in the grass -- all of it sends me running back inside into the cave of my own making, to squint at book after book, while avoiding my own...

The best thing ever?  She's written like FIVE other books!
It's like discovering treasure.

(Call me a fan -- I've been called worse!)