A Brace of Dog Memoirs

Behind every so-called coincidence lies a series of connections, some small, some large, that if traced back far enough, lead inevitably to the great source of meaning and purpose in this otherwise senseless universe, namely, dogs."

-- Susan Conant   All Shots

I don't like memoirs very much.  As a rule.  I think the rise of the memoir form goes hand in hand with the narrowing and impoverishment of fiction in the twentieth century, and I'm sure I'll have more to say on that in the future.  But, for the moment, I can be as much of a hypocrite as the next guy, and I have to admit that there is one form of memoir that I avidly devour.

The dog memoir.

Not that there's anything special about them, in the literary sense.  They have all the faults of memoirs in general -- self-centeredness, over-sentimentality, and a kind of near-sightedness that distorts reality like a fish-eye lens.

But they have dogs in them.

And that makes all the difference.  At least to me. 

The science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon once promulgated the law that "Ninety percent of everything is crap."  He was probably being generous, but that does mean that even in the least literary of literary genres there must be something worth reading.  So I wanted to mention a couple of memoirs that I've read lately that stand out from the pack.

Until Tuesday by (Fmr. Captain) Luis Carlos Montalvan is -- in addition to being a dog memoir -- the story of an Iraq war veteran struggling to deal with the physical and mental scars of his service. And it is a story told with remarkable restraint, and almost no self-pity or sentimentality.   Montalvan suffered traumatic brain injury as a result of an explosion and suffers from post traumatic stress disorder.  He recounts how difficult it was for him to return to day to day life:

Before Tuesday, I caught glimpses of snipers on rooftops.  Before Tuesday, I spent more than an hour in my apartment working up the courage to walk half a block to the liquor store.  I took twenty medicines a day for everything from physical pain to severe agoraphobia, and even benign social encounters caused crippling migraines ... Before Tuesday I couldn't work.  I drank whole bottles of rum in one sitting to escape, but still lay in bed, unable to shut my eyes.  And every time I did, I saw terrible things ... After one grueling therapy session I went to a coffee shop, opened my laptop, and saw the face of a suicide bomber from Sinjar...

Tuesday, of course, is a dog.  A beautiful Golden Retriever who stares out of the cover of the book with intelligence and a hint of a smile, holding a set of dog tags in his mouth.

Bad Dog, by Martin Kihn, also has a dog on the cover -- but in this case in extreme close-up that makes it hard to identify the breed. (Bernese mountain dog).  Hola is a not just another breed -- she's a very different kind of dog than Tuesday.  She tackles people, chews up furniture, runs after busses and chases drug dealers.  (An activity which can be very dangerous for her owners.)  She has no training, no socialization and definitely no manners.

 Her owner is also a different breed.  Marty (Martin Kihn) is a high functioning alcoholic who has been a TV writer and a management consultant, but is rapidly on his way down, about to lose his job and his marriage.  Oh yeah, and he has to something about that dog too.

"Is it just me," I ask my ninety-pound copilot, framed in the rearview mirror like a hairy Andy Warhol Marilyn, "or is everyone losing their minds?"

I'm sorry to say, she seems to be sorry to say, it's just you. 

"Did we miss our turn?  I can't see the signs."

And I, she says, can't read....

There are few guarantees in life like the one I will make to you now:  you will get lost.  Very lost.  So far from your destination you'll be looking out the window as darkness descends, watching street signs change into another language....    

And that, really, is what these two books -- so very different on the surface -- have in common.  They are about getting lost.  And they are about relationships.  In both cases, about the unique relationship between a troubled man and a dog.

But two very different dogs.

Tuesday was born to be one of the most highly developed dogs in the world -- an assistance dog for the disabled -- and he began his training when he was three days old, long before his eyes opened...

Very different:

At a certain point, without announcing it even to ourselves, we gave up.  I gave up.  We'd had our idea of what a pet should be, and we'd been baited and switched.  We'd been had by the dogs of the gods or vice versa.  She was housebroken; she seemed happy; she didn't actually bite people, with a single exception ... What I know now is that settling for a dog who is housebroken and doesn't draw blood is like settling for a child who can talk.... And I might as well admit that the exception was my wife.

What Luis Montalvan finds in Tuesday is a companion and a best friend.  With Tuesday at his side he more and more braves the world, meets people, goes back to college, begins a new career.  As someone who has had a service dog I, I was deeply moved by the description of Tuesday.  Their friendship and partnership portrays the human-canine bond at its best.

Martin Kihn's story is funnier, more acerbic -- with many more rough edges. His humor is usually trained directly on himself (and sometimes, lovingly, on Hola) and if he's not always devoid of self-pity, at least he knows it, and makes it funny.   Hola is a wild dog, and a dog that many of us will recognize (hopefully in somewhat gentler terms).  When his wife leaves him, Kihn is forced to take drastic action.  That action is to enroll himself and Hola in training classes for the American Kennel Club's Canine Good Citizen program -- a way for dog's to attain certification in the basics of civilized behavior.  It seems impossible for Hola -- and for Kihn -- in the beginning.  And as any dog trainer will tell you, training the dog is easy; it's training the people that's hard.

Both of these books succeed -- on my terms -- by being books about a person and a dog in an equal relationship.  These aren't books of cute dog stories, or inspiring life lessons learned from furry teachers. These are real stories about life with real dogs.

As different as they seem on the surface, Until Tuesday and Bad Dog make good pack mates.  If you love memoirs (I know you're out there) or you love dogs -- as I do -- these are great books to curl up with.  Make sure to have some treats handy.



Readers interested in books about dogs might also like to check out my earlier reviews:  "Goodbye Alpha Dog", "Two Dogs in Search of a Master", "A Nose for Justice", "Whatever Happened to America's Dog?" and "Scent of the Missing".

You can also enjoy my recent article "Crazy Flickers" over at 10,000 Birds.  They have a great site, well worth checking out even if I wasn't included.  

Readers of Birds and Beasts might also enjoy our sister blog Birdland West, which covers birds and wildlife, mostly in the Seattle Area.

Pukka: The Pup After Merle

 

 Pukka: The Pup After Merle

Merle's Door, published in 2007 is one of the books (along with Marley and Me and a few others) which helped create the "dog memoir" trend).  But even a quick look at other entries in the field will show that Ted Kerasote's book about his friendship with Merle is something unique.  Merle, an independent "free thinking" dog who Kerasote picks up on a canoe trip, is one of the most fully drawn, three dimensional canine characters in literature.  He is not a pet, not a even a companion -- he is an equal partner in a friendship between two adults, and the story of his relationship with Kerasote is both life affirming and inevitably heartbreaking.  In addition, Kerasote seasons the book with information about canine history, genealogy, and evolution, leading to fascinating reflections on the special relationship between humans and dogs.  More than one reviewer has said that Merle's Door may be the best book ever written about dogs, and I think it would be very hard to argue the point.

Ted Kerasote's new book, Pukka: The Pup After Merle, is a very different breed.  Where Merle's Door is a book about a friendship, with its inevitable goodbyes, Pukka is a book about beginnings.  And where Merle was the remembrance of a dear friend, Pukka is a collaboration.  The book consists of Kerasote's photographs of his young puppy (as well as the glorious Western landscape) and of Pukka's funny, surprisingly wise commentary.  It is the story of a new relationship told from the point of view of a puppy.  Is it as good as Merle's Door?  Well, anyone who has ever lost a dear canine friend, and begun a partnership with a new puppy, will know that question is impossible to answer.  No matter what you expect, the newcomer always exerts his own personality against all expectations -- and Pukka's funny, curious, intelligent personality is everywhere in this book.  All the challenges of raising a puppy and all the mystery of exploring the world again with a new friend, seen through the eyes of the puppy himself.    The world comes alive again through Pukka. 

(Full disclosure:  I lost my beloved canine friend Roscoe not long after I read Merle's Door and I adopted my new puppy Zeke not long before I read Pukka.  So the experience of Kerasote and his friends resonates strongly with my own.)

Pukka: The Pup After Merle

Merle's Door

Out There: 

Blood Ties

 

 

Ted Kerasote was kind enough to grant us an interview.

 B&B: To start off, I just want to say that I've been deeply moved by your work.  I read "Merle's Door" before my own dog, Roscoe, was diagnosed with cancer, which is fortunate because I'm not sure I could have read it afterwards.  Its very clear from the book that Merle was an amazing dog.  Do you want to talk a little about him (I'm sure you get this question all the time) and your relationship?  What it meant to you, and how writing to the book fits into that?

TK:  Someone one asked Robert Frost what a poem he had just read meant.  He read the poem through again.  Merle's book says everything I wanted to say about how much I loved him and what he meant to me.  The book was my way of cheating death and getting three more years, every day, of being with Merle, as I recreated him in every detail.

B&B: You book says a lot about the lessons you learned from Merle.  Have there been more lessons to be learned form writing about him, and from the response of people to the book?

TK:  One of the reactions I've gotten from people has been very surprising.  Hundreds of people have written, saying that they loved the book, it made them realize that life was short and that they were in . . . here they say one of the three things:  that they were in the wrong relationship, the wrong job, or the wrong place, and that they needed to change that.  I thought I had written a book about my dog.  I hadn't realized that Merle's lessons had such far-reaching implications.

B&B: I would imagine that animals have always been important in your life.  What kinds of relationships did you have with animals when you were young?  What do you think you learned from them?

TK:  I had two earlier dogs, Jingles, a German Shepherd-Collie-Husky cross, and Tippy, a Beagle-Terrier cross.  Jingles taught me how I wasn't ready to have a dog (I was five); Tippy taught me how much fun dogs have when they run free (she went to college with me and ran free on the rural campus with the other dogs while I was in class).

B&B: Our site is also about books.  Have you always been a reader?  What authors and books have been most influential on you?  What are you reading now?

TK:  I've always been a reader since my very earliest childhood.  Tolstoy, John Fowles, Hemingway, Farley Mowat, Herman Melville, T.S. Eliot, George Orwell all had an influence on me as I was developing as a writer.  Who am I reading now:  Patrick O'Brian, Alexander McCall Smith, Alan Furst, Jodi Picoult, Alexander Dumas, Jane Austen, Elizabeth Gilbert, Simon Winchester.