Still Life at Eighty: The Next Interesting Thing

Memoirist Thomas (What Comes Next and How to Like It) takes a tender look at aging and memory in this meditative account. Opening the narrative with a vow to embrace “living in the ever-shifting constancy of now,” Thomas describes the surprising lightness she felt in the wake of her 79th birthday in 2020, eating leftover cake for breakfast, surrendering to adult diapers, and happily napping to excess. In short, punchy chapters, Thomas illustrates her initial conviction that there is still plenty of life to be lived in old age, and how that outlook shifted when she and the rest of the world were forced to stay at home during the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic. As Thomas sat in her chair in Woodstock, N.Y., and sifted through her memories, she clung to recollections of love affairs and quiet family moments, each one given new meaning by her forced isolation. Like the slow-blooming wisteria vine growing from Thomas’s desk that reappears throughout the narrative, the power of her remembrances emerges gradually, but they join together to form a beautiful whole. Fans of Gail Godwin’s Getting to Know Death would do well to check this out. (Nov.)