It may not be obvious at first glance, but a genuinely radical idea lurks at the heart of Still Life at Eighty: The Next Interesting Thing, the spare and supremely lovely latest memoir from American author Abigail Thomas.

Tucked amid vivid musings about everyday things like dogs, stink bugs, and orchids, Thomas powerfully and persuasively makes the case that aging is wonderful and not to be dreaded. 

“You know you’re old when you stop trying to fix people,” she writes. “When you don’t wonder what you’re missing. When you relish your own company. When you see a young woman with her whole life ahead of her and your first thought is: Thank God that isn’t me.”

In an interview from her home in Woodstock, N.Y., the mother of four, grandmother of 12 and great-grandmother of two says she likes to write about aging, loves being 83 and wouldn’t turn back the clock if she could.

“Sure, things go wrong with your body, but being old is simpler and more fun,” she affirms. “You can say whatever you want. You can walk down the street and not care who whistles and who doesn’t. That’s really freeing. Being invisible is a superpower and not something to complain about.”

Such assured self-knowledge is a concept the thrice-married, dog-adoring Thomas – daughter of renowned science writer, researcher and physician Lewis Thomas – has been exploring throughout her career, which she started in New York as a book editor and agent before publishing her first short story collection, 1994’s Getting Over Tom, when she was 53.

Her next two books, An Actual Life (1996) and Herb’s Pajamas (1998), were novels, but things took flight with her startlingly candid 2006 memoir, A Three Dog Life, which chronicled the devastating brain injury suffered in 2000 by her late husband Richard Rogin, who was it by a car while walking the couple’s dog in Manhattan, which reordered her life in the aftermath. The book was fêted on year-end lists by The Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post, and firmly established Thomas’ highly original voice, which was also leveraged to acclaim in the memoirs Safekeeping (2000) and What Comes Next and How to Like It (2015), and the writing guide, Thinking About Memoir (2008).

That voice is on display again in Still Life at Eighty, written mainly during the pandemic. In the mold of What Comes Next, its intimate, sometimes quotidian experiences and reflections are told in very compact first- and third-person narratives. Some entries are just a few lines. Take “Bat Won’t Leave House,” for example: “Is the headline on a site where Woodstock residents present problems asking for solutions. I’m in love with this stubborn little bat. Bat won’t leave house. Oh, please, whoever you are. Let it stay.”

In “A New Solution for Dread,” Thomas shows her talent for keenly observed, amusing minutiae. “There’s a first-class stamp affixed to the floor of my porch. It wasn’t there before,” she writes. “The first thought in my untethered mind is that if my house is trying to mail itself somewhere, it isn’t going to get very far. Where was it planning to go? The beach?”

In the new book’s introduction, she explains how she needs an open mind to receive ideas for the next thing she wants to write about. “Sometimes it shows up in disguise, a bug, say, or a particular shade of blue, a joke somebody made that wasn’t funny. And when I feel that tug, especially if it makes no sense, I pay attention. Because you never know.”

Stephen King is a huge fan, and wrote glowing squibs for What Comes Next and Still Life at Eighty, which he describes as “a little jewel of a book, full of epiphanies that are comforting and merciless in the gentlest possible way.” King and Thomas shared the late editor and agent Chuck Verrill, one of Thomas’ dearest and oldest friends, who was often referenced in her stories. He died in 2022, before he could read Still Life at Eighty.

“So, I really had no idea if the book was good or not,” she says, adding that King is “a very nice man. We both really loved Chuck. And he does like my writing which matters as, well, he’s quite a good writer,” she laughs.

Still Life at Eighty arrives from a new publishing division launched by the independent Woodstock bookstore, The Golden Notebook, which highlights books with ties to the region. Thomas moved upstate from New York to be closer to Rogin, who was living in a nursing home after his accident. The author – and her cherished mutts – fell in love with the area.

Thomas says she writes to gain clarity on her thoughts and as a way of navigating emotions like grief and dread, and often refers to the American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots to source the provenance of words she finds fascinating. These include “acceptance,” which, she writes, evolved from a word that meant “a thread used in weaving,” and “miracle,” which came from a word that meant “to smile.”

“The worst thing for a memoirist is having a memory like a steel trap, because you don’t know what’s interesting,” she says. “You just remember it all. If you have a rotten memory like me, the moments you do remember are quite clear and all you need to do is distill them. You don’t have to dress them up.

“I really do think writing is a way of staying sane. Plus, when you make yourself extremely vulnerable — when things are brought out of the basement toward the light — they don’t have as much power.”

Thomas insists she probably wouldn’t have become a writer had she not been kicked out of college her first year because she was pregnant with her first child. “There are all these big ‘No Trespassing’ signs when you’re reading about how to write,” she says. “All this stuff about the narrative arc. F–k the narrative arc!” she laughs. “Just write it.”

In Still Life at Eighty, she also suggests everyone try writing as a means of self-expression. “At 83, I find I live in the moment, and every moment holds a world,” she says. “There are a million things that can swim into your mind, or catch your eye, and then you start writing.”