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What Comes Next and How to Like It: A Memoir Audiobook
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Publisher Description
From the bestselling author of A Three Dog Life, which “shines with honest intelligence” (Elizabeth Gilbert): a fresh, exhilarating, superbly written memoir about aging, family, creativity, tragedy, friendship, and the richness of life.
What comes next? What comes after the devastating loss of Abigail's husband, a process both sudden and slow? What form does her lifelong platonic friendship take after a certain line is crossed? How to cope with her daughter’s diagnosed illness? Or the death of her beloved dog? Is life worth living without three cocktails before dinner? How do you paint the ocean on a sheet of glass?
And how to like it? How to accept, appreciate, enjoy? Who are our most trusted, valuable companions and what will we do for them? Instead of painting an ocean, paint a forest, turn it over, scrape the surface, and presto: there is the ocean. When you’ve given up, when you least expect it, there it is.
What Comes Next and How to Like It is an extraordinarily moving memoir about many things, but at the center is a steadfast friendship between Abigail Thomas and a man she met thirty-five years ago. Through marriages, child-raising, the vicissitudes and tragedies of life, it is this deep, rich bond that has sustained her. Listeners who loved “the perfectly honed observations of a clear-eyed and witty writer” (Newsweek) in Thomas’s “spare, astonishing” (Entertainment Weekly) memoir, A Three Dog Life, will relish this beautiful examination of her life today—often solitary, but rich and engaging, with children, grandchildren, dogs, a few suitors, and her longtime best friend.
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“Though her memoir is written with the classy precision of a veteran editor and author, Abigail Thomas reads to listeners with the unrehearsed emotion of a chance meeting with an old friend…What lingers in the heart, even more than the ring of truth in her speaking voice, is her artist’s sensibilities as she shares with beautifully textured language her observations about life’s pleasures and tragedies. Hearing her talk about joy, loss, love, and the unavoidable pain of human frailty is an experience that will make listeners feel less afraid to engage with life as it really is. Winner of the AudioFile Earphones Award.”
— AudioFile
Quotes
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“A beautifully felt, deeply moving memoir… Abigail Thomas is the Emily Dickinson of memoirists, and so much of this book’s wisdom is between the lines and in the white spaces.”
— Stephen King, #1 New York Times bestselling author -
“This may be the most honest book I’ve ever read…dizzyingly truthful, often funny, lyrical, [and] wise.”
— Anne Lamott, New York Times bestselling author of Small Victories -
“A keenly observed memoir…[Thomas] writes of the changes aging brings us all and of coping through love: of family, dogs, a well-turned phrase. She is superb company.”
— People -
“Is ultimately about how to live with the hand one is dealt: its disappointments and surprises, the grief and the grace…The result is a thing of beauty, largely owing to the author’s utter fearlessness in the face of the unexpected.”
— Economist (London) -
“One of the many gifts of What Comes Next is the news Thomas brings us from the front lines of old age, peppery and witty, neither romanticized nor denied.”
— Chicago Tribune
Awards
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Winner of an AudioFile Earphones Award
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About Abigail Thomas
Abigail Thomas, the daughter of renowned science writer Lewis Thomas, is the author of several books, including the memoir A Three Dog Life, which was named one of the best books of 2006 by the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post.