Tuesday, May 05, 2015

A Memoir that Beautifully Examines an Ordinary Life






By Jamaica Ritcher    |   Monday, May 04, 2015 - Off the Shelf
I first encountered Abigail Thomas’s Safekeeping: Some True Stories from a Life six years ago, during my first semester of a graduate program in creative writing and at the suggestion of my thesis advisor. At first, I assumed my professor wanted me to study the book’s structure. Safekeeping is built of three sections (“Before,” “Mortality,” and “Here and Now”), each composed of vignettes, some three or four pages in length, and many as short as a paragraph.
This structure—vignettes, collected and individually titled—conveys Thomas’s motivation: to take stock of memories and moments previously unorganized, perhaps even hidden or ignored, to give her past meaning and achieve what is suggested in the epigraph, taken from the Beatles song “Hey Jude”: Take a sad song and make it better... READ MORE



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