In August of 2010, my father and siblings were having a week-long reunion at an Amherst Island cottage, a preemptive alternative to seeing each other too often at funerals.

“I'm writing this article about Thomas,” I said, one evening, “and collecting impressions. How would you describe him?”

We were lounging around the darkish living room, with gin and tonics for some and Sudoku for others.

“Tall,” said my sister Pauline.

“Tall, awfully tall,” said my stepmother Joan.

“He's very useful,” said Pauline, “If you need something, he'll build it.”

“No, I mean, what he's like, stories about him,” I said.

“He's shy,” said Mariella. “He used to watch lots of movies when we'd come to visit.”

“He loves his mother,” someone said. “He never got over what she sacrificed for him.”

“He has enthusiasms,” said Mariella. “That's plural.”

My eighty-nine-year-old father wrote out a list of Thomas's qualities in his careful, beautiful handwriting.

“Afflicted?”

“His health hasn't been too good,” said my father.

“He's a storyteller,” said my brother Peter. “That pretty well sums it up.”

Life as a Raw File

Living with a fiction writer can be unsettling. I've learned that people in Thomas's world tend to say what he'd like them to have said. Versions of events can sound too neat to be fully plausible. On an airplane trip, for instance, shortly after the publication of Medicine River, a female flight attendant, inquiring about what Thomas was reading and eying the dust-jacket photograph on his own book, ostensibly commented, “I wouldn’t mind meeting that author.”