This is one in a series of popular Q&As with [b]old women, about their writing and their life. - Debbie

Abigail Thomas, who turned 83 in Oct. 2024, is funny, profane, and direct. She doesn’t give a shit about stuff that most of us worry about, like the downsides of old age, death and dying, and others’ expectations. We’re exactly ten years apart in age and, although this is dreaming big, I want to be just like Abigail a decade from now. I want to be brave in the face of loss1, if need be; I want to relish being old and stop judging my aging body; I want to be fearless as a writer (and publish another book2); I want to capture fragments of life with perfect clarity; and I want to eat as much no-guilt French Toast as she does. And why not? Abigail’s unsentimental but considered approach to life and writing are the perfect expression of what it means to be a [b]old woman. 

She’s entirely comfortable with how she lives: she still smokes3, she no longer drives or takes long walks, she’s all about easy-to-make sweet meals like French Toast, and she writes in deliberate fragments,4 no apologies or explanation necessary. She says her Substack, What Comes Next, is the perfect platform to publish her fragments as she writes them. I interviewed Abby (as her friends call her; she said I could too) on my podcast last year, and I had forgotten something important until I listened again to the episode. Abby challenged me to start writing after I confessed that the podcast was my five-year procrastination project.

She gave me a writing prompt, “Here’s a lie I’ve told before” and I jotted down a few sentences about not grieving for my mother, who had died a few months earlier. Of course, that was a lie; I WAS grieving, but it was complicated. Her prompt is one of the things that got the ball rolling and I started [B]old Age shortly after, in June 2023. Thank you, Abby, for giving me a push, and for our conversation below.

DW: What is your morning ritual? Tell us everything! Do you journal? Coffee? Dogs? Clay vs. writing? Do you write everyday?

AT: I wake up early, feed the dogs, make and drink coffee, sit in my chair and pick up wherever I left off in what I was writing yesterday. Great to wake up already in gear, dying to see what I will find out today when I write. If I run out of energy for writing, I pick up a great handful of clay and look for what’s in there. I like going back and forth. One thing nourishes the other.

DW: What is your writing process? Do you work in a favorite spot in your house?  

AT: I sit in my chair by five windows that stretch around me. Sometimes I think I’m outside. I try not to smoke but fail. I look at yesterday’s work, do a little distilling if it seems necessary, maybe move something around or take it out. 

DW: You worked for many years as an editor in addition to being a bestselling author yourself. What are your two or three best writing tips?

AT: If you are writing memoir, make sure you are not avoiding the dark places. What you keep buried out of sight takes all its power from the dark. Drag it into the light. You will see it is finite, it has edges. It loses all its power in the light… 

Find a reader you trust completely, if you want someone to look at what you’ve done. Don’t think about publishing, just do the writing. Thinking about publishing will sap your energy for writing.

And when you write, leave your ego at the door. Writing badly is necessary to get to the first line that is the real beginning. Nothing is wasted when you write. You can write 300 pages to get to your first sentence. But those 300 pages were necessary.

DW: What’s it like to be 83? You told me on my podcast that the 80s have gravitas and that you feel “superior” to younger people who are running around trying to stay healthy. Tell us more. 

AT: Well, God. Yes. Desperately staying strong and healthy is so boring. Have a piece of cake. Have two. It seems so humorless.

I love being eighty-three. I love all the petty and even the not so petty concerns that seemed so important that now have vanished. I have no vanity, no embarrassment, no guilt left. Guilt has grown up and become regret. Guilt keeps you center stage. Regret urges you to do something to make amends, something invisible, helpful, or maybe even something funny. I indulge and enjoy myself, and I write. What I write is fun for me, and it’s lovely when other people like it, but I write really for clarity, for myself. And you can’t fool yourself, so you write truthfully. Otherwise there’s not much point in it. Not that there has to be, necessarily, an obvious point.

DW: What does [b]old age mean to you? 

AT: I only know it is easier than being young… Don’t get me wrong, I had some good times being young, but it’s just lovely not to give a shit what you look like or who’s looking back. That self-consciousness is all gone. And you have more time to observe and reflect. Never again to ask your kids, “Do these earrings make me look fat?”

DW: Do you consider yourself ambitious? Has your ambition about writing or something else changed as you’ve gotten older? 

AT: My best friend, Chuck Verrill5, answered my question of what made us such good friends so fast? by saying, “because neither of us had any ambition.” Which we didn’t. I love to write, and I want to write well, but that is its own reward. I don’t need any prizes or recognition that makes headlines. I don’t want to run anything or have any titles.

And I do love giving workshops that have good people and good writers in them but that’s pretty much it. And I love my family. They seem to love me and forgive me all my mistakes. What more is there, really?

DW: What’s the biggest surprise about reaching old age?

AT: How much fun and how much easier it is. And all the things I was afraid I would miss just went out the window ages ago.

DW: What is your biggest regret when it comes to life or writing? 

AT: My biggest regret used to be the poor job I did as a mother, but I got better at it, whatever that means, and I am so proud of all my kids for different reasons. I don’t have any regrets about writing. I started late, but so what. I think before you do the one serious thing, it’s helpful to have made mistakes and learned from different kinds of failures.

DW: Looking back, what is one thing you are especially proud of? 

AT: That I finally at the age of forty eight, began to write, and kept at it until it was good. And I’m glad I wrote Safekeeping, that got me going with memoir. We all have so many different stories. Almost different lives.

DW: Are you afraid of death or dying?

AT: No. Earth can’t sustain a species that doesn’t die. It’s the natural order of things. I’m afraid of coming back. Unless as corn, or kudzu, or a rock pool by the sea.

Abby is a New York Times-bestselling author of three works of fiction, four memoirs, including Safekeeping; A Three Dog Life, What Comes Next and How To Like it, and Still Life at Eighty, which Scribner's6 will publish in November, and Thinking About Memoir, a book about writing. She has four children, twelve grandchildren, two great-grandchildren, two dogs7, and a high school education8. She’s the daughter of renowned physician and science writer Lewis Thomas and is working on a book about dealing with grief by making things out of clay.

She began molding clay when her longtime agent and friend Chuck Verrill was in hospice and dying. As she explains above, “If I run out of energy for writing, I pick up a great handful of clay and look for what’s in there. I like going back and forth.” When she’s writing, she captures in luminous detail whatever small thing or moment attracts her interest; it’s always significant because, as she might put it: “This is the way an old woman’s mind works; I am alive and alert right now, and that’s enough, dammit!”9 I hope that’s what will be in my head ten years from now.

Here’s a marvelous article about Abigail Thomas posted on her 83rd birthday (Oct. 13, 2024): Writing Saved My Life by Prajna O'Hara

Questions for readers

• Do you find that, as you grow older, you care less about a lot of things that used to seem important?

• Do you find [b]old age easier than being young?

• What was your favorite line from Abby’s Q&A?

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Abigail’s writing prompt inspired my most revealing essay

If this Q&A resonated with you, I’d love to have you as a paid subscriber. Your support helps me continue the work of writing that matters, to me and to you. Paid subscribers get access to my most personal essays like this one, about my mother; this essay took me weeks to write and is one result of the writing prompt Abigail gave me.