“The startling power and beauty of Abigail Thomas’s memoir, A Three Dog Life, comes not only from her acute perceptions of a man without memories and her fear of losing her husband but from her refusal to surrender the shards of a loving relationship.”
—O, THE OPRAH MAGAZINE


“In her spellbinding memoir A Three Dog Life, Abigail Thomas (Safekeeping, Getting Over Tom) writes about how her domestic world was abruptly shattered, and then slowly rebuilt over 15 [sic] years, after her husband was hit by a car while walking their dog and suffered irreversible brain damage—a memorable account of how tragic loss can lead to ineffable moments of surpassing love and miraculous change.”
—ELLE


“This haunting memoir is slim but wields enormous impact. Five years ago, the author’s husband—a retired reporter she met through a personal ad in the New York Review of Books—was struck by a car and suffered traumatic brain injury. As a result, he survives with a jumbled memory, living almost entirely in the present moment, occasionally spouting nonsense like “The goat’s mouth is full of stones.” Meanwhile, the author draws day-to-day emotional support from her three dogs: beagle Harry, who was present at the accident; Rosie, a dachshund-whippet mix (“a union that must have come with an instruction sheet”); and Carolina, a hound she adopted. Thomas (author of another memoir, a novel and two story collections) crafts keen commentary on dogs, owners and the ways they bond, sometimes with off-center anthropomorphic humor. Thus when Carolina goes into heat and attracts a male husky, Thomas imagines him as a Brando-esque ruffian wearing “jeans and a white t-shirt.” Indeed, despite its title )derived from an Aboriginal expression for a cold night—hence the rock group) this book tackles the largest of human subjects—love and loss.”
*Critic's Pick
—Natalie Danford, PEOPLE MAGAZINE



Three Dog Nightmare
"In the time it took for Abigail Thomas’s dog to slip his leash and dash into traffic and her husband, Rich, to follow, their lives were devastated.

Thomas’s bracingly honest memoir, A Three Dog Life (Harcourt), chronicles the five years after her husband’s traumatic brain injury, an accident which forced him to be institutionalized with terrifying hallucinations and psychotic episodes, and which heartbreakingly erased all memory of their past together.

Forced to adapt to a life alone, Thomas grieves the loss of the man who was her husband, while coming to terms with the man he is now—facing reality with courage, bursts of anger, patience, and dark humor.  What resonates most, though, is her generosity: “I am lucky—I know what has changed, I know where I am.  Rich’s compass is gone, he has no direction home.”

It is in the home that Thomas finds solace.  Discovering that friends, family, and dogs (Carolina, Harry, and Rosie), as well as the power of writing, can reshape a life of chaos into one that, while wrenchingly sad, makes sense—a life full of its own richness and beauty."
—VANITY FAIR



Woman's Best Friend
What can we learn from dogs? A lot, but it takes careful listening.
A THREE DOG LIFE, A Memoir, By Abigail Thomas, Harcourt. 182 pp. $22
STEALING LOVE, Confessions of a Dognapper, By Mary A. Fischer, Harmony. 267 pp. $23
Reviewed by Suki Casanave

"Abigail Thomas is learning to live -- and her dogs are teaching her how. Rather, they are teaching her how to begin again after losing her husband. He isn't dead but has suffered a brain injury so severe that he has, essentially, disappeared. The person Thomas married is gone. Her "new" husband must spend the rest of his life in an institution. He slips in and out of rages, terrors and hallucinations. The author, though still married, is alone now, traveling in a foreign land, stumbling through unmarked territory. Her dogs show her the way.

As she reconfigures her life, Thomas discovers, slowly, that she still has moments she can share with her husband. And she learns to cherish them -- and him -- in new ways. "Rich and I don't make conversation; we exchange tidbits, how well we've slept, what was for breakfast. We are stripped down to our most basic selves, no static, no irony, no nuance. . . . Rich and I sit together, we hold hands; we are warm-blooded creatures in a quiet space, and that's all the communication we need."

The author keeps a small notepad with her when she visits her husband or when he comes home to spend an afternoon. Sometimes she scribbles furiously when he speaks, startled by moments of lucidity or by oddly relevant utterances that sometimes emerge from his jumbled thoughts as if he were a momentary sage. "I feel like a tent that wants to be a kite, tugging at my stakes," he announces one day. And Thomas writes it down. Always she is looking and listening, hoping for proof that the Rich she once knew, or some version of him, is still there.

But this book is not so much about her husband as it is about the author herself -- and how she learns to piece together a new life. Along the way she articulates one of life's mysteries: It is possible to feel both acutely sad and genuinely happy at the same time. "Rich is necessary to my happiness," she writes. "I love the person he is now, I love who I am when I'm with him, and I can sometimes hold these two truths in my head at once: I wish he were whole, and I love my life."

Not only does Thomas experience the exhilaration of learning to live alone, but she discovers that she can, and still does, love her husband. Her dogs lead her to this insight. In the snuggling presence of their warm bodies, they show her the powerful comfort of simply being together. Her dogs are, to her, wordless wonders, ever-present reminders of living in the moment. They show her, in their wordlessness, that language, at some level, may be pointless -- or at least greatly overrated. "An unexamined life may not be worth living, but the overexamined life is hell," she notes. "We talk too much."

Perhaps it is this skepticism, this wariness of language that makes Thomas use it so sparingly and with such precision. Structured in a series of vignettes, her memoir is strung together with threads of lilting prose and keen observation. "After lunch Rich always takes his old place by the sink and begins to wash the dishes," she writes. "No part of him has forgotten the slow circling of the sponge on the face of the plate, or the careful rinsing of glasses or cleaning between the tines of a fork. . . . Later he will put on his reading glasses and take up the paper. The dogs will deposit themselves near our feet. The afternoon will slide into evening, and before it gets dark I will take him back to the place where he lives, but not yet. For now, he will look at the paper and I will look at him, and let what's over and done with disappear in the here and now."

For Thomas, it seems, the act of writing itself has become an act of redemption. From the depths of catastrophe, she has crafted a painfully honest and loving portrait of the irrevocably altered life she finds herself leading. The stories are few, the moments are spare, but what Thomas tells us is shot through with light.

Mary A. Fischer's Stealing Love , by contrast, is full -- almost too full -- of examples of the potentially damaging effects inherent in language. Her childhood was scarred by hurtful words and a heartbreaking lack of deeply felt, unspoken love. "We subsisted on emotional crumbs," she writes, "because there was nothing else." As she becomes an adult, the effects of her childhood and the underlying issues remain the same: She tells of her unsatisfying relationships with her family members and her peers, especially men. Only the dogs (and several other animals) in her life provide a source of solace.

Fischer's memoir revolves around the tragic institutionalization of her mother in an asylum for the mentally ill. Today, Fischer suggests, her diagnosis would likely have been depression. But in the 1950s, people living on the edge were often given "treatment" that tipped them into the abyss, instead of pulling them back to the more normal life they might have lived with the right kind of assistance. Earnest and solidly written, Fischer's account of her life often resembles a diary, one that includes countless detailed entries most helpful perhaps to the writer herself.

As a motherless child whose emotionally absent father sends her to a strict and cheerless boarding school, Fischer develops an acute empathy for the plight of those who are suffering. Years later, as she rescues dogs from abusive homes -- actually donning dark clothes and a hat for a nighttime foray into a neighbor's yard, for example -- the parallels with her own life are obvious. The book's subtitle, however -- Confessions of a Dognapper -- is oddly misleading. Readers hoping for some rollicking tales of adventure will be disappointed. The handful of dognapping incidents are essentially used as a device to frame the book -- described briefly in the beginning and then in more detail in the closing chapters.

In the end, despite different approaches, Thomas and Fischer highlight the same simple fact -- dogs don't talk -- and then follow it to a profound truth. A great many people, it seems, could take a few life lessons from the dogs celebrated on these pages. Less talk, more quiet companionship; less critical commentary, more unconditional love -- the list of "Dog Lessons for a Happy Life" goes on. Sure, our canine companions have their share of scuffles. They bark and fight. They have their droopy days. But they get over it. Before long they're back -- bouncing and wagging, ready for love."
—Suki Casanave, WASHINGTON POST BOOK WORLD

"A leash breaks. A dog darts into Manhattan traffic. His owner chases him. And in seconds, two lives are changed.

Rich Rogin didn't die when a car smashed into him, but life as he and his wife, Abigail Thomas, had known it abruptly ended that spring night in 2000. Catastrophic brain injury left the former reporter half-blind, hearing-impaired and profoundly changed emotionally and cognitively. An entity survived, but Rich, the kind, warm, funny guy, was gone, morphed into a man with no short-term memory who was wracked by rages and paranoia but capable of poetic wisdom and touching expressions of love.

There is no shortage of books by writers who have seen a spouse die (Joan Didion, Donald Hall). Thomas, a novelist, short-story writer and teacher who is the daughter of the late biologist Lewis Thomas, faced a different challenge: writing about the loss of a personality, if not of a person. In her brief but deeply absorbing memoir, she takes on the task of chronicling her grief and guilt — she had talked Rich into adopting the dog, whom he came to adore, and bought the faulty leash — and the agony of learning a new way to love and live.

In essays all the more powerful for their pared-down language, she describes how tragedy can bend but not break a relationship. There is no blatant heart-tugging, although much of the story is heartbreaking. She is no Pollyanna, yet she is inspirational. Rather, she shows us how she handles, with the unlikely help of two beagles, an improbable dachshund-whippet crossbreed, knitting, cigarettes and the occasional cocktail, the sorrow and the challenge of moving forward.

After brain surgery, Rich almost seems recovered. Then the rage and restlessness consume him, and it becomes obvious he can no longer live in their New York City apartment. Eventually he is moved to a center near Woodstock for patients with brain damage, and she buys a house nearby. In the process, she makes new friends, overcomes lifelong fears and discovers hidden strengths.

Once a week, his condition permitting, she brings Rich to the house. He remembers almost nothing, trapped as he now is in the moment, but they can hold hands, take walks, snuggle in bed together. In a sort of holy silence, they are content, even thrilled, to simply be in each other's company. It is not the same — it can never be — but it is something, and it is precious.

Yes, everything is ''changed, changed utterly.'' But, just as Yeats does in his poem, Thomas shows us sometimes, out of disaster, ``a terrible beauty is born.'' "
—Carole Goldberg, THE HARTFORD COURANT



"Abigail Thomas' life changed forever the day her husband, Rich, took their dog for a walk and was struck by a car. Rich suffered irreversible brain injuries that resulted in premature dementia, bouts of rage and psychosis. Incapable of caring for him, Abigail places him in an institution, then tries to figure out what to do with the rest of her life. She moves to a small town to be closer to the facility where Rich is cared for and takes most of her comfort from her hound dogs, Harry, Rosie and Carolina. She learns from them the true meaning of family through their loyalty and love. Thomas writes honestly and straight from the heart. There's no happy ending, but A Three Dog Life offers hope that life can retain its richness after a tragedy."
—Carol Memmot, USA TODAY



A Jagged Peace
“Some writers are squirrelly about using writing as therapy. Not Abigail Thomas. "Writing," she once unabashedly told a group of students at the University of Iowa, "is the way I try to make sense of my life, try to find meaning in accident." With two memoirs, one novel, two collections of short stories and two children's books in which most of the material directly echoes her experience, it's fair to say she has performed the literary equivalent of analysis. "Sometimes," she has said, "just holding a pen in my hand and writing milk butter eggs sugar calms me."

Thomas, the daughter of writer-scientist Lewis Thomas ("The Lives of a Cell"), was kicked out of Bryn Mawr College in 1959 as a first-year student. Her transgression? Becoming pregnant. Years later, this inspired her novel, "An Actual Life." At 26, with three children (one from her first husband, two from her second), she divorced and became a single mother. After the divorce, her second husband died.

This portion of Thomas' life was documented in the memoir "Safekeeping," a glittering collection of fragments, tesserae and memories fashioned into a book. "My life didn't feel like a novel," she wrote in response to her editor's request that she make it into one. "It felt like a million moments." A similar aesthetic infuses her short story collections, "Herb's Pajamas" (featuring four interlocking stories about apartment dwellers on New York's Upper West Side, where the author, who teaches at the New School, lived for decades) and "Getting Over Tom" (which is narrated by edgy women in various stages of love trouble). Both of these efforts also draw their settings, events and characters from Thomas' life.

Thomas' new book, "A Three Dog Life," is a memoir of the five years after her third husband, Rich, a retired journalist, was hit by a car on 113th Street and Riverside Drive. The accident left Rich with traumatic brain injuries — injuries that caused short-term memory loss, dementia, anger and all manner of delusions. The ambulance report, which did not escape the writer's eye, read, "dead, or likely to die."

"This is the one thing that stays the same," the book begins: "my husband got hurt." In the ensuing pages, Thomas dances back and forth, in and around the accident, examining her life and how it has changed. "I'm bored by chronology," she has written elsewhere. "I don't believe in chronology. Time is too weird." Here, then — as in "Safekeeping" — she uses fragmentation as a coping mechanism and a literary strategy.

When friends ask how she's managing, she answers, simply, "This is the path our lives have taken." Two years after the accident, she reflects: "Time has gotten skewed, as tangled as fish line." Every carefully created routine is shattered, as Thomas must literally construct a new life. "I miss my husband," she writes. "I miss the comfort of living with this man I loved and trusted absolutely." And although she spends very little time looking at the past, memories of the 13 years they spent together before the accident do bubble up. "The past is not as interesting to me now as it was when I was young, and it would certainly come up," she observes. "There's nothing I want to relive — certainly not youth — and as for what's to come, I'm in no hurry. I watch my dogs."

For Thomas, the dogs are essential: a way of finding solace, of remaining connected, a key part of her recovery. She writes fondly of nights spent with them curled up in bed beside her, insisting that, to banish melancholy, you need not one or two, but three. (The concept, and the book's title, is explained in an epigraph from Wikipedia: "Australian Aborigines slept with their dogs for warmth on cold nights, the coldest being a 'three dog night.' ") Harry, the beagle that Rich chased into the street the night of the accident, is the first. Thomas feels no animosity for Harry, only love and tenderness. "I don't find it ironic," she claims, "that the very reason Rich got hurt is the creature who comforts me. There is no irony here, no room for guilt or second-guessing. That would be a diversion, and indulgence." After the accident, she adopts Rosie — half dachshund, half whippet — to entertain Harry, and later brings home Carolina Bones, another "kind of beagle," to play with Rosie when Harry becomes sedentary.

Eventually, Thomas leaves her Upper West Side apartment and buys a house close to Woodstock, N.Y., to be near the nursing facility she has found, after much agonizing, for her husband. She is filled with survivor's guilt, enormous guilt that she did not bring him home. In the meantime, though, she puts "a life together with my family and friends and dogs." Rich is not neglected; she visits frequently and brings him home with her for days at a time. (Often on these visits he has no idea where he is.) Even in the midst of this tragedy, she finds herself making small, glancing progress toward something that looks a little bit like joy. "How dare you," she asks herself, surprised at her own happiness. "You built this on tragedy."

What is life like? A reader can't help asking as she reads Thomas' uncluttered and willfully honest prose. Is it one step, two step? Or is it one step, look up, two step? The future "is no longer my destination," Thomas writes. "When I was young the future was where all the good stuff was kept, the party clothes, the pretty china, the family silver, the grown-up jobs. The future was a land of its own, and we couldn't wait to get there."

In the course of this memoir, Thomas is left squarely in the moment. This landing is all the more resounding because she has held the moment, the unchanging thing, in her hand and looked at it from all angles. "[M]y husband got hurt," she writes, and the clarity is stunning. This is writing that is truer to the way the human mind works and lives and organizes material than writing that is organized by Manichean principles like past and future; before and after; happy and unhappy; right and wrong. Life gives us new information every second. We walk around, not through it.”
—Susan Salter Reynolds, LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK REVIEW



“This memoir could be a fall sleeper.  Thomas rebuilds her life after her husband is dreadfully incapacitated.  It’s neither a downer nor a smug testimonial to the triumphant human spirit, just the perfectly honed observations of a clear-eyed—and witty—writer.”
—NEWSWEEK



“This frank, impressionistic meditation belies its warm, fuzzy title. Three pooches have accompanied the author in the five years since her husband, Rich, walking one of them, was struck by a car on the Upper West Side. “I don’t find it ironic that the very reason Rich got hurt is the creature who comforts me,” she writes. Suffering a traumatic brain injury, Rich becomes violent, poetic, perhaps psychic. Abby is melancholic and angry when she moves near Rich’s upstate hospital, but her journey is also flecked with joy: She relishes her independence, artistic awakening, writer friends. This trade-off stings as it soothes, as do Rich’s flashes of lucidity. “I feel like a tent that wants to be a kite, tugging at my stakes,” he blurts during one visit. It’s one of many moments of surreal beauty that Thomas relays in crisp, unsentimental prose. Here, love can’t exactly conquer all, but it assumes radically new, stunning shapes.”
—Justin W. Ravitz, TIME OUT NEW YORK



Living On, One Day at a Time
“We last bumped into Abigail Thomas in 2000, in her sparkling memoir ‘Safekeeping,’ striding down Broadway into the new millennium—a bouncy grandmother who had navigated life's squalls and doldrums and had at last found a snug harbor with her third husband, Rich, ‘the nicest man in the world.’ That phrase reappears in Thomas' powerful new memoir, ‘A Three Dog Life,’ inscribed on pencils presented to Rich by a friend.

That was before the accident.

Five years ago, the nicest man in the world went out to walk the dog and never came home. Hit by a car, his head shattered, Rich is declared by police ‘dead or likely to die.’ Two lives change forever.

Today, Rich lives in an institution in ‘a kind of primordial twilight soup’ infused with hallucinations, paranoia, rages and, on good days, peace. The man who'd been a reporter, a birder, a runner; who made a mean omelet and described their dog's ear as ‘a velvet lily pad’; who was always ready with a flashlight or a Band-Aid now takes an hour to put on a sock and randomly says things like ‘the goat's mouth is full of stones.’ He knows no past or future.

‘A Three Dog Life’—a title that plays on a three-dog night (a night so cold one needs the body heat of three dogs to keep warm) and refers to Thomas' own three dogs—illuminates a new life built on tragedy but not tragic. ‘I have to resist the impulse to create memories suitable for framing,’ says Thomas, who indeed lets us in on the horror, but also the highs, of her brave new world. In original, often poetic prose (‘my life had begun to feel shapeless, like underwear with the elastic gone, the days down around my ankles’; ‘the Tai Chi experts, like figures on a marvelous clock ... seem in their slow-motion way to be untelling time’; ‘my apartment looks like somebody's half- eaten sandwich’), she lays it out.

Post-accident, she starts smoking (again). She takes up knitting, producing mountains of ponchos, scarves, ‘things with ruffles.’ She quits smoking. She shops (‘shopping is hope’). She dumps her claustrophobia, which for years had kept her climbing 13 flights to her apartment to avoid the elevator. She sells the apartment, throws out 30 years of her diaries (‘very liberating!’), including the one that begins ‘Today I married my darling.’ ‘The past is in the wastebasket,’ observes her brother-in-law.

She learns to live alone (again)—‘cooking or not, making the bed or not, weeding or not,’ eating standing up, looking, not leaping, a grown-up at last. She stares down guilt. ‘Here is how I get my husband in the car: I lie.’

She plays this bad hand she's been dealt—angrily, bravely, with deep love, loyalty and the odd laugh—venturing into Rich's pastless, futureless world. In the cafeteria, she sits with him as he devours condiments he's carefully squeezed from their packets onto plates. Rich visits Thomas on Thursdays and she feels ‘married again’—he washing up the lunch dishes as he always did, then sitting by the fire with her for an afternoon. When words fail, she climbs on his bed in the nursing home and they nap holding hands (‘having a lie-down,’ he used to call it). Thomas treasures a picture he draws of a banner strung between trees that says, ‘Welcome home Abby and Rich.’ It breaks her heart.

But out of the blue, Rich can say dreamily, ‘I feel like a tent that wants to be a kite, tugging at my stakes.’ Lovely. Asked if he needs to use the bathroom, he answers, ‘Why? Do you have a dire need for fresh urine?’ Laughter all around. Often Rich ‘knows things he can't possibly know,’ uncannily speaking what's on Abby's mind or in her life beyond his borders. Is hindbrain, man's earliest, wordless brain, still in there, revealed by the accident, Thomas wonders? ‘I love this stuff,’ she says.

These days, like Rich, who is adrift forever in the present, Thomas finds the future ‘is no longer my destination.’ We imagine her wry smile: ‘I'll jump off that bridge when I come to it.’”
—Judith Long, NEWSDAY



"Thomas has elevated what could be, at best, an overemotional sermon or, at worst, a grim romp in self-pity to a high plain of true inspiration."
—BOOKLIST (starred review)



"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."
Copyright © 1997-2005 Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
—PUBLISHER'S WEEKLY



"Approximately five years ago, Thomas's (Safekeeping) husband, Rich, was hit by a car, a trauma that left him with an erratic memory and injuries requiring institutionalization. In this heart-wrenching memoir, Thomas tells of her struggles to build a new life. She and Rich met through a New York Review of Books ad when he was 57 and she was 46. It took her "about five minutes to realize this was the nicest man in the world and he asked [her] to marry him thirteen days later." A writer and teacher, she moved from New York City to a smaller town to be closer to Rich. She added two more dogs to her family, learned to knit, and found support in unexpected places. More important, she faced her guilt, turning it into a quiet gratitude and finding the necessary emotional resources for survival. In lesser hands, their backstory might have seemed sentimental or cloying, but Thomas balances the reader's need to know with sensible boundaries that are respectful of privacy. This is highly recommended reading for all caregivers and healthcare professionals."
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
—Pam Kingsbury, Florence, AL, LIBRARY JOURNAL