"You don't have to start right, you just have to start. Put pen to paper, allow yourself the freedom to write badly, to get it wrong, stop looking over you shoulder." ~Abigail Thomas
While reading A Three Dog Life many words resonated with me. The story itself was exquisite. Life is complicated, difficult, an intricate web of occurrences and our reactions to them. Our stories are our own. Thomas manages a memoir that reflects life after a catastrophe so simply.
Contents of our fridge. The grocery lists.
Nibbling among our beloved pets, crumbs falling to the floor.
One too many manhattans.
Abigail's husband suffers a traumatic brain injury after getting hit by a car while walking the dog and life as she knows it transforms. Reroutes in a way she could not and had not foreseen.
While reading other reviews I was in awe of those who considered her to be cold, detached and heartless, maybe because I too have often been accused of being detached, but I felt quite the opposite about her. I felt more like she's just honest. Rather than presenting herself according to societal standards of how one is supposed to behave in a time of tragedy she tells her story as it really is.
Her words are unpretentious and genuine as though she is dictating the story to the page. Speaking it out loud while her pen hits the paper to match the tempo.
"You don't have to start right, you just have to start," stays with me. Not just as a writer, as the context it is placed in but as a person. Fear of failure, (success, ridicule, change, rejection) keep so many of us from starting.
Give yourself permission to make the leap.
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