Published: August 01. 2010 2:00AM

Reviewed by Ashley Warlick
CONTRIBUTING WRITER

Much about our life story necessarily depends on who we are telling it to; what we tell our mother is different than what we tell our girlfriends, our lovers, our own children. Thus the act of making a memoir is an interesting endeavor; an author creates a story suitable for any audience, streamlined, sanitized, or sometimes a story suitable for no one, something so intimate it almost seems to be told inside the author’s own head, leaving the reader in the awkward position of eavesdropper. At their worst, memoirs can be queasy bargains between curiosity piqued and good old-fashioned rubbernecking. At their best, they are written by Abigail Thomas.

“Safekeeping” is a memoir made in the care with which it treats its audience. On the surface, it seems simple, a collection of pieces that address Thomas’s feelings around the death of her second husband, to whom she was married for 20 years, with whom she had one child, a sad divorce and a surprising friendship later in life. The pieces are short, individually titled, piercingly beautiful in their smarts. In the first section, entitled “Before,” she writes, “I am remembering this time just before I knew you, and then I knew you, and then you died. It makes the parentheses in which I lived most of my life.”

But Thomas offers the context for those parentheses as well, particularly concerning the other important men in her life. She was married at 18 to the father of her first three children, and met her second husband when she was 26 and separated, a single mother, lightly employed. After her second husband, she went on to marry again, a man she met through a personal ad in an academic journal and knew for 13 days, a man who also became friends with her second husband before he died. The children from her first marriage were raised in her second, bore grandchildren in her third; all of these lives and relationships intertwine. But instead of feeling knotty and dense, “Safekeeping” is a book filled with space, with different perspectives, with room to consider what you are being told and how it fits with the whole.

Sometimes Thomas speaks confessionally, directly to the reader, or to her dead husband. Sometimes she plays narrator with the facts, crafting a scene from her life as though she’s watching herself. Often, these pieces reflect her more difficult moments, and the distance she might have felt from herself at the time. She writes:

When she was very upset (“very upset” was how she put it to herself) and didn’t know why yet, she went to her father. She couldn’t help herself. This was toward the end of her second marriage. They sat out back on an overturned rowboat. She stared at the gray paint peeling off the boat and the grass growing up alongside. She told him she was scared all the time …

Sometimes Thomas recounts conversations with her sister wherein she fields pointed questions about what’s included in the very book she’s making, and what’s left out. These conversations seem to function as a kind of guiding force, a moral beacon, another clue to the deeper context she’s drawing from. We are left with a graceful, sensitive book, a chorus rather than a gaze into one’s navel, still incredibly intimate in tone. A masterpiece, made from what’s at hand.