Getting over Tom

Readers will recognize the author of these delicious stories as a fellow foot soldier from the battle of the sexes. Abigail Thomas seems to know everything there is to know about women who always fall for the wrong man. Her characters range from child brides (who are also child mothers) to middle-aged grandmothers (who indulge in cradle-robbing flings). They say things like: "I thought he had noticed me and I knew it was one of my better days, because a woman standing next to me whispered, 'You don't have a stitch on under that dress, do you?" and: "'I miss you,' he says, turning around, and his voice is soft and low and full of places to lie down.". These stories, about open-hearted, unsuspecting women of all ages, are so knowing, so effortlessly funny, so poignant, that it's clear from the very first page we're in the hands of a writer who has spent her adult life becoming a hands-on expert at Loving Too Much. Thomas, who started writing fiction at fifty, says she spent her twenties and thirties, "very caught up in what people, especially men, thought about me, defined by who loved me at that moment.". Abigail Thomas's first book of stories proves she has got the goods on both the "Loving" and the "Loved." That she also has the keenest sense of both the sublime and the ridiculous sides of romance is what makes Getting Over Tom so enchanting. And if the title leads you to think of Dick and Harry also, well...