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 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.

She has written three works of fiction, Getting Over Tom; An Actual Life; and Herb’s Pajamas; and three memoirs: Safekeeping; A Three Dog Life; and Thinking About Memoir, a guide to writing memoir which doubles as a kind of memoir itself. A Three Dog Life was chosen by the Washington Post and the LA Times as one of the best books of 2006 and has been translated into nine languages.

Her essays and stories have been published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, O the Oprah Magazine, Real Simple, Tin House, Cosmopolitan Magazine, The Ladies’ Home Journal, The Missouri Review, the Alaska Quarterly and other magazines.

She lives in Woodstock, New York, with her three dogs.