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A Three Dog Life

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Overview

When Abigail Thomas's husband, Rich, was hit by a car, his brain shattered. Subject to rages, terrors, and hallucinations, he must live the rest of his life in an institu­tion. He has no memory of what he did the hour, the day, the year before. This tragedy is the ground on which Abigail had to build a new life. How she built that life is a story of great courage and great change, of moving to a small country town, of a new family composed of three dogs, knitting, and friendship, of facing down guilt and discovering gratitude. It is also about her relationship with Rich, a man who lives in the eternal present, and the eerie poetry of his often uncanny perceptions. This wise, plainspoken, beautiful book enacts the truth Abigail discovered in the five years since the acci­dent: You might not find meaning in disaster, but you might, with effort, make something useful of it.

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Author Information

Bio of Abigail Thomas

Abigail Thomas, the daughter of renowned science writer Lewis Thomas (The Lives of a Cell, etc.), is the mother of four children and the grandmother of twelve. Her academic education stopped when, pregnant with her oldest daughter, she was asked to leave Bryn Mawr during her first year. She's lived most of her life on Manhattan's Upper West Side, and was for a time a book editor and for another time a book agent. Then she started writing for publication. A Three Dog Life is her fifth book; the most recent, Safekeeping, is also a memoir. She teaches fiction writing in the graduate program at The New School and lives in Woodstock, New York, to be near her husband, Rich.

Customer Reviews

  • 5 stars out of 5Loved it

    Posted September 08, 2009 by Joyce, Detroit

    This is a great book. Not really about dogs per say but a very good book.

Additional Info

Imprint

Harvest Books

Filesize

348.47 KB

Number of Pages

188

eBook ISBN

9780156033060

Excerpt from: A Three Dog Life by Abigail Thomas

Stephen King's front-cover endorsement of Thomas's memoir as the best he's ever read--and a "punch to the heart"--will surely pique interest in this wrenching, elegiac portrait of her third husband, Rich, who flounders in a miasmic present after a hit-and-run in their Manhattan neighborhood shatters his skull, destroys his short-term memory and consigns him to permanent brain trauma. A deft balance of fevered pathos and dark humor link this memoir, in spirit and theme, to Safekeeping, Thomas's collected vignettes that memorialize her second husband. But Thomas also finds wellsprings of inspiration in her tragicomic interactions with Rich and in the self-reliance she's forced to develop, aided by her faithful dogs (the book's title adapts an aboriginal phrase, derived from the tradition of cuddling with dogs on frigid nights). Rich--himself reminiscent of a Stephen King eccentric--utters eerily prescient, absurdly poetic non sequiturs, probing the essence of time and love with ingenuous intuition, though his acute paranoia and confusion make these exchanges truly heartbreaking. Thomas's quick-cutting chronology and confessional narration subtly re-enacts the soupiness of her husband's mind, even as she quietly thanks him for the wisdom of living in the present. (Sept.)
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