Ellie’s Story by W. Bruce Cameron

Posted on August 25, 2023 by pagesofjulia

Another one from my young friend. I knew this was a risky book for me, because dogs are my kryptonite, or my Achilles’ heel, if you will. My young friend does not know this. I read the book anyway, but I knew it would hurt me, and it did.

It’s a good book, and I enjoyed it in some ways, but an important part of this review is to say that it hurt me.

Librarians I have known have a shorthand code for a way to talk about whether books will hurt us. We say, does the dog die? This is generally metaphoric – there may not even be a dog – but you get the idea; if ‘the dog dies,’ the story takes a tragic turn that might make readers cry. In this book, the dog does not literally die, but I did still cry. (Note that I am an especially messy reader on the topic of dogs. Your mileage as always may vary. But if you have a soft spot like I do, beware.)

The title dog Ellie narrates her story from birth. Cameron does a good job with this voice: not only a voice of innocence but a canine one, Ellie tells what she sees and hears around her, her comprehension gradually growing, but the reader mostly understands more than she does. (She is, in a strange turn, able to relate human dialog, which we understand but she does not.) A German shepherd puppy, she’s chosen by a police officer out of her litter, and trained to be a search-and-rescue dog. She bonds with this owner/handler, Jakob, but he is injured in a shooting and she’s reassigned to a new handler, Maya. Ellie is an especially talented search-and-rescue dog, and continues to do excellent work with Maya. Ellie’s Story entails several great, heroic events, culminating in one I’m going to call pretty unlikely; but it’s a very impactful tale, emotional and moving (obviously), and with some fun educational info about search-and-rescue dogs built sneakily in. I also like that this edition includes discussion questions and activities both for the family at home (warning: this book has your family signed up for some significant work!) and for the classroom. Solid.

A good book, but risky for some of us. I’ll steer clear of more like it, myself.

Rating: 7 socks.

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Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward (audio)

Posted on May 10, 2021 by pagesofjulia

Following on Ward’s excellent (nonfiction) Men We Reaped, I found her earlier novel Salvage the Bones, read by the same narrator, Cherise Boothe. This one I loved less for a while in the middle, but I loved it at the end. And I’m afraid my one real criticism of this novel is my fault and not Ward’s. I’ve read 14 and a half books since I started listening to this audiobook – the shape of my life involves so little listening time these days. The long middle of the book dragged for me; I felt the pacing was off, but it might be the pace at which I took the story in, and not the pace at which the story is told.

Esch is fifteen years old, the only girl in the family. She has three brothers. Skeetah, sixteen, is entirely consumed by his love for his fighting pit bull, the china-white China. Randall, seventeen, is a gifted basketball player, whose friends occupy much of Esch’s attention – especially Manny, who she can’t keep her eyes off of. Then there’s Junior, seven, fed and diapered by Esch and Randall after their mother died giving birth. They live in Bois Sauvage, Mississippi, and their father is present, but only physically. He is drunk and a bully, and more concerned with hurricane season than his four children. Only halfway into these pages do we hear the name Katrina for the first time.

The novel opens with China giving birth in a poorly lit shed to her first litter of puppies. The whole family gathers round. Skeetah is rapt; his dog and her puppies are his whole world. Esch watches him watching them. He is the brother she is closest to, but China’s motherhood also holds new meaning for the girl, who is just realizing she is pregnant. In the novel’s twelve day span, from the birth of China’s puppies to the aftermath of Katrina’s devastation of their coastal town, that pregnancy feels like the subtext of every other story: Daddy’s obsession with the approaching storm; Skeetah’s obsession with his dogs; Randall’s focus on his sport; Junior’s low-level whining and neediness; Manny’s distance from the girl he treats as sex toy and not human; Edith Hamilton’s Mythology, which Esch is reading for school. This thread makes a significant contribution, even though its screen time (if you will) is brief. Esch is captivated by the strength and singlemindedness of Medea, the crooked model of motherhood she presents. In the world of Bois Sauvage – poverty, lack of parenting, the closeness of siblings who care for each other when no one else does – Medea offers a surprising outside point of reference. Also, I read the same book for school at the same age (under very different personal circumstances), and I found the parallel striking.

There is a stagnant time in the novel’s middle, again, where I got a little adrift. And again, it may have been my slow reading (listening) pace. But Esch takes her time acknowledging her pregnancy; she vomits and can’t get enough to eat; China’s puppies begin to die one by one; Daddy behaves badly; the weather hangs heavy and humid. Actually, the weather and restiveness feel a lot like the time before a hurricane hits. Also, Manny is such a terrible guy that I got sick of him very quickly and was forced to spend more time considering his awfulness than I’d have liked. So there was a hard bit for me in the middle.

But once Manny’s betrayal becomes clear, and the storm begins its approach, things pick back up. The stakes rise before the water does; there is a dog fight, and a human one (or several). In the end, this novel considers the profound effects of Katrina and the fierce love of kids who look out for each other. The account of the storm itself is striking and impactful. Esch is a hero, not a victim.

Katrina: the mother that swept into the Gulf and slaughtered. Her chariot was a storm so great and black the Greeks would say it was harnessed to dragons. She was the murderous mother who cut us to the bone but left us alive. Left us naked and bewildered as wrinkled newborn babies, as blind puppies, as sunstarved newly hatched baby snakes. She left us a dark Gulf and saltburned land. She left us to learn to crawl. She left us to salvage. Katrina is a mother we’ll remember, until the next mother with large merciless hands committed to blood comes.

Motherhood is bloody when it is taught by Medea, and by China, the mother who fights and rips, whose white coat is streaked with blood in her victories. Her own mother is gone, so Esch learns this fierceness. It’s not romantic or pretty, perhaps, but it is something to marvel at.

There is no question that this story is beautifully told and I think masterfully told, my problems with pacing notwithstanding (again, perhaps mea culpa). Ward continues to impress. I am hypnotized by the storm, and the storm in Esch. I do recommend this novel, and Boothe’s narration here.

Rating: 8 shoes.

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Solutions and Other Problems by Allie Brosh

Posted on January 27, 2021 by pagesofjulia

I used to follow Allie Brosh’s blog, Hyperbole and a Half. (I always loved that name.) I did not read her first book, by the same name, but I love the blog. This is her second.

Solutions and Other Problems is brilliant. Brosh is so vulnerable, honest, willing to share, and hilarious. Her openness is disarming and I think healthy both for her and for her readers who are comforted by knowing that they’re not alone in their struggles. And some of what she has to share is raw and painful. But also, she makes me laugh harder than almost anything, ever. I mean I laughed until I cried, gasping, couldn’t breathe, peed on myself. I was oxygen-deprived; she nearly killed me, I laughed so hard. (The funniest bits, for me, are anything about pets, and the chapter about the car stereo system and the smartphone trying to boss her around.) I would love to be able to spend a few minutes every day laughing this hard. I guess I need to re-follow her blog.

This is a graphic work – as in graphic novel, but nonfiction. A graphic memoir-in-essays, if you will; it’s not linear, but a sampling of experiences that have been especially funny or painful or moving. Because she jumps around so much and generally gets a little silly (in all the best ways), I thought it was neatly appropriate that (as noted by a brief “Explanation” following chapter 1) Brosh’s chapters are numbered but there is no chapter four. “Because sometimes things don’t go like they should,” she explains, and because she’s exercising a little power here, and we should be grateful she didn’t take it further than she did. It’s a random little bit of ridiculousness; but it’s also expressive of the kind of fun and angst I think she excels at.

Brosh’s illustrations are also a little ridiculous, fanciful, hilarious, and distinctive. I love them. She explains the world as she experiences it, in part, through fictional monsters and fantasies. Her drawings capture the mystery and awkwardness of life in a way that feels precisely right. (And I think she has dogs down pat.) (The Oatmeal‘s pretty good at this too.)

At one point she notes,

Experiencing real loneliness for the first time is like realizing the only thing you’ve ever loved is your home planet after migrating to the moon.

and I think that’s just perfect. I recognize this feeling. I had to migrate to the moon to find out just how place mattered to me.

I find Allie Brosh’s work comforting, as well as so funny that it leaves me a little breathless and wrung out. I recommend her so strongly, and I guess I need to go back and find the first book now too. Thanks, Liz, for the recommendation.

Rating: 9 sneakponies.

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Dog Years by Mark Doty

Posted on April 3, 2020 by pagesofjulia

Love for a wordless creatures, once it takes hold, is an enchantment… This is why I shouldn’t be writing anything to do with the two dogs who have been such presences for sixteen years of my life. How on earth could I stand at the requisite distance to say anything that might matter?

How indeed?

I love Doty, as you know, and this book is an excellent example of some of the qualities of his work that I love best. He is thoughtful, meandering, wise, self-deprecating, shows his thinking transparently on the page, and has the most precise and loving eye for beauty; he turns most every observation of the world into ekphrasis somehow, by which I mean that he turns the same active, joyful, inquisitive observation to the Massachusetts shoreline or a NYC sidewalk that he turns to a museum-quality painting.

This review is a trigger warning of sorts. I love Doty, and I love this book, and I’m glad I read it, but it was also painful as hell. Dog Years is about beloved pet dogs who die (as they do), and it’s about 9/11, and it’s about death and loss. It is also absolutely relevant that I read this during the pandemic of the spring of 2020, and everything feels a bit more raw these days, the angst a bit closer to the surface than usual; and I have in no way recovered from my dear Ritchey dying more than a year and a half ago now, and my dear Hops is not even 12 yet but he shows his age. This book was beautiful and transcendent and really hard on me. I mean it as a compliment – this book comes with a warning because it’s so well done.

Because, you know, a book about a beloved pet dog dying could easily be (and they usually are) insipid, overly sentimental, a cheap shot. And I think telling the story of 9/11 (or Katrina, I think about that one a lot too) is awfully hard to do in a way that’s not going to sound like anybody could have told it. (This is true of the pandemic of 2020, too. Who will tell that story well? Will it be Doty? I’d buy that book. See also Paul Lisicky’s excellent recent release, Later. A little awkward: Paul Lisicky appears in Dog Years as Doty’s husband, which is no longer the case.) In other words, Doty has undertaken an ambitious book, which aims to do a couple of things at once that look nearly impossible to do well, even individually. But of course he’s knocked it out of the park. (It is a sign of my faith in him that I undertook to read a book about dogs dying. Whew.)

The dogs in question are Arden, a black long-haired retriever, and Beau, a golden retriever(ish). They are very specific beasts, individuals, as dogs are. Arden belonged to Mark Doty and his partner, Wally, in Provincetown, Mass., where Wally sickened and eventually died of AIDS, but not before Mark brought home Beau to join the family as well. “My friends think I’ve lost my mind: You’re taking care of a man who can’t get out of bed and you’re adopting a golden retriever? They do have a point, but there’s a certain dimension of experience at which the addition of any other potential stress simply doesn’t matter anymore.” (That is a golden retriever puppy, I would add.) Widowed, Mark (and Arden and Beau) will eventually form a new family with Paul, and it is in this shape that they make their way to the end of both dogs’ lives, eventually, after much travel and moving around – including living in New York City in September of 2011… I have seen Doty handle grief and loss before (although I’ve not yet read Heaven’s Coast, so there is still that), most recently of course with What Is the Grass, where death forms one of the five sources of Whitman’s genius. And Doty’s, I’d say. The way that these strands are intertwined is lovely and perfect.

When the towers fall, the enormity of all that loss and death and threat to the world is too much to conceive. “With the world in such a state, isn’t it arrogance or blind self-absorption to write about your dogs?” But Doty knows that “we use the singular to approach the numberless,” and this echoes one of the lines I most obsess over in Still Life With Oysters and Lemon, about “the strangeness and singularity of things…” (There is again an echo of the thread in Still Life that is about reflection, in all its senses: “We know ourselves by how we’re known, our measure taken by the gaze of the outsider looking in.”) The singular losses of Arden and Beau offer Doty a way to write about 9/11 and about topics larger than them. The unique to communicate the universal, and the personal to illuminate the public.

For me, what is perhaps the crux of this book came early. “To attach, to attach passionately to the individual, which is always doomed to vanish–does that make one wise, or make one a fool?” This is a more personal review than usual, but here we are. This is something I’ve been wrestling with, the enormity of loving again after the pain of loss, and I can’t quite believe that either way, the yes or the no, is the right thing. But I always feel I’m in good hands with this writer. Maybe I’ll figure something out if I keep reading.

Of course you known as well that I love Doty’s detailed lists of things, his descriptions (ahem) and the simple fact of his attention turned to all the humble things… the soup Arden smells on that sidewalk. “Of Franco’s retail experiment, there remained for several years an odd little lamp beside his old shop door marked with a thirtiesish design that would have held no meaning if you didn’t know what it had illuminated–but now that’s gone, too.” Things and meaning and the spaces they held, left behind.

Oh! I nearly forgot to mention structure, which absolutely needs mentioning here. Longer, numbered (untitled) chapters do the work of memoir, of memory, not entirely chronological but at least following life in some form; some of them take the form more of essay than of strict narrative, like in chapter three, when he lists and details seven “aspects to our delight” in dogs. Between these are spliced shorter pieces headed Entr’acte (an interval between two acts of a play or opera; a piece of music or a dance performed during an entr’acte), titled and not numbered. These generally take the present tense, and range as widely in content and theme as the rest of the book… and wouldn’t you know, my MFA thesis took the same structure, longer memoiristic essays with short lyric pieces in between… There is also a good bit of Emily Dickinson in this book, and I think my new approach to poetry is just to let Mark Doty tell me about it.

This is a writer I return to for guidance, and this book is an exemplar of what I appreciate about him, but (if you love a dog) it may hurt you, too.

Rambling review brought to you by the pandemic and my difficulty focusing, and the pain that this beautiful book brought me.

Rating: 9 obstreperous things.

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Maximum Shelf author interview: Jennifer Finney Boylan

Posted on February 12, 2020 by pagesofjulia

Following Monday’s review of Good Boy, here’s Jennifer Boylan: We’re Here to Love Each Other.

Novelist, memoirist and short story writer Jennifer Finney Boylan is also a nationally known advocate for human rights. She is the inaugural Anna Quindlen Writer in Residence at Barnard College of Columbia University, and her column “Men and Women” appears on the op/ed page of the New York Times. Her 2003 memoir, She’s Not There: A Life in Two Genders, was the first bestselling work by a transgender American. From 2011 to 2018 she served on the board of directors of GLAAD and also provided counsel for the TV series Transparent and I Am Cait. She lives in New York City and in Belgrade Lakes, Maine, with her wife, Deedie. They have a son, Sean, and a daughter, Zai. Boylan’s memoir Good Boy: My Life in Seven Dogs, will be published by Celadon Books on April 21, 2020.

photo: Dan Haar

What inspired this book?

I think a lot of people, when they’re a little older, look back at their lives and wonder, how did I get here? It can be a challenge to connect who you’ve become with who you’ve been, for a transgender person like me. And yet it’s not a dilemma that’s unique to transgender people. I think we all seek to connect our pasts and our presents. When I look back, one of the constants in my life would be the dogs that I’ve had. And each of those dogs represents a particular phase of my life. There’s the dog I had in boyhood, there’s the dog I had when I was a nascent hippie, when I was a college boy, and then a young hipster, and a boyfriend and a husband and a father… it occurred to me it would be an interesting way to connect present to past, to talk about the dogs who were a constant over a very complex life.

How was writing Good Boy different from writing She’s Not There, more than 15 years ago?

With She’s Not There, it was all very new to me. Whereas at this point in my life, I’ve lived a third of my life as a woman, almost 20 years. She’s Not There is very much a book about transition. Good Boy in some ways is a book about dogs, but also about masculinity. About boyhood and manhood. It strikes me that a woman in late middle age who had a boyhood has a unique insight on what that experience was like. I have to be careful with this metaphor, because I don’t want to be insensitive, but I sometimes think that being a transgender person has something in common with immigration. I wasn’t born here in the land of women, but I do have my green card. I look back on boyhood and masculinity in the kind of way that my great-grandfather looked back on Ireland: a place remembered well but also a place you’re glad to have escaped from.

I’m able now to celebrate some of the joys of that life. It was a life I was delighted to escape, and I feel so lucky to have landed where I am. She’s Not There was a book of trouble–I was trying to solve a lot of problems over the course of my life with that book. I think I’m able to take a more generous look at masculinity, now that it’s so far in the past.

There is both pain and humor in your story. How do you balance those elements in storytelling?

I’ve always thought those two things come from the same well. Some of my favorite writing is the kind where you’re laughing one minute and in another you’re overwhelmed by a sense of sadness. American humor is funny–we think of humor as the lesser art form compared to tragedy. When was the last time that the winner of the Best Picture Oscar was a comedy? Was it Annie Hall, in ’76, ’77? The humor of fart jokes and frat boys is one thing, but the humor that comes from a life of trouble and absurdity is a much deeper form. I think that kind of writing and the literature of sadness comes from a very similar place.

It seems you and your family have sorted out the rules about sharing personal information. How do you negotiate that?

Well, I don’t know if we have it figured out. There are times when I just feel very sorry for them all, being stuck with me. One of the things that you learn in this book is that my older child came out as transgender a couple years ago, and that completely floored me. That’s not a story in which I come off very well, quite frankly. There are ways in which my own initial response to my child coming out as trans was not as generous as was my Republican evangelical Christian mother’s response to my coming out as trans 20 years before.

In the past I’ve written a lot about my children, and I’m sorry to say I think sometimes I’ve used the stories of their success in the world as kind of a way of proving to people that I am not that bad a person after all. And perhaps, in previous works, I might have waved that flag a little too vigorously. I did have my older child read the book. I had my wife read the book, to make sure everybody was okay with everything. But you still worry. I hope in the end that the people that I love and that love me have some respect for what I’m trying to do as a storyteller, and trust that what I’m doing essentially is done with love. My mother used to say, “It’s just as easy to tell nice stories. Why don’t you tell some nice stories instead?” I think if it were just as easy to tell nice stories I probably would. But the drive wheel of story is conflict. A true story that has conflict in it is going to be about people who at least at times are at loggerheads. You hope in the end that you show how people come to an understanding of themselves and each other, but it’s often a qualified resolution, and not everything being tied up neatly with a bow. There are some things that never get resolved.

Does this book have a moral or a lesson?

I think we all know that if we’re here for any reason at all, it’s to love one another. And yet it turns out that loving each other is not easy, and a lot of the time it’s something that we’re not good at. For men in particular, expressing love can be really difficult. For women, too, but my memory of masculinity is that a lot of serious things, and love not least, had to be expressed ironically or through understatement or through these long pregnant silences. And what dogs do is give us a way to express the love that’s in our hearts in a way that we don’t have to feel ashamed of. You can see the most serious, somber person in the world, and then they get a dog in their arms and suddenly they’re blubbering all over the place and kissing Bingo on the head. If there’s a message, it’s that we all should share the love that’s in our hearts, and if you find that difficult, get a dog.

A lot of times in this book, you’ll see a moment where I’m really messed up. My father is dying upstairs, or I’m out in the woods trying to figure out how am I ever going to get through transition, or I’m wondering how am I going to be a good parent to my daughter. And at those moments, the dogs are there. Lucy and Ranger and Brown. And they put their heads in your lap and you understand that you’re not alone. The message that they have for us is not that complex. Most dogs are not deep thinkers (unlike cats–cats are philosophers). Most dogs kind of know one thing. And that is that we’re here to love each other, and also maybe that it’s always good to have a snack.

This interview originally ran on January 22, 2020 as a Shelf Awareness special issue. To subscribe, click here, and you’ll receive two issues per week of book reviews and other bookish fun.

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Maximum Shelf: Good Boy: My Life in Seven Dogs by Jennifer Finney Boylan

Posted on February 10, 2020 by pagesofjulia

Maximum Shelf is the weekly Shelf Awareness feature focusing on an upcoming title we love and believe will be a great handselling opportunity for booksellers everywhere. The features are written by our editors and reviewers and the publisher has helped support the issue.

This review was published by Shelf Awareness on January 22, 2020.

Jennifer Finney Boylan tells her life story with both sweetness and fierceness in Good Boy: My Life in Seven Dogs. A coming-of-age story, a tale of finding and owning of self, and an elegy to a series of delightful and frustrating mutts, this is an occasionally heartbreaking but ultimately feel-good memoir about life and love.

Boylan’s 2003 memoir, She’s Not There, about her trans experience, was the first bestselling book by a transgender American author. Good Boy differs in several particulars: for one, there are dogs. “This is a book about dogs: the love we have for them, and the way that love helps us understand the people we have been.” It follows the path of Boylan’s life, from a confused and troubled boyhood through various teen and young adult phases, to dating and marriage, and finally to the decision to transition and the recent happy years as wife and mother to two young adults. Through these years and epochs, seven dogs in particular helped Boylan mark time and observe change, and learn to love.

First came Playboy, “a resentful hoodlum who loved no one except my father.” He chases and attacks motorcycles and is happy to raise a leg or squat indoors. “My father thought this was kind of funny, but then he was never the person who had to clean it up.” (That person was Boylan’s mother, and she would continue the unenviable task of cleaning up for several dog lifetimes to come.)

Then there was Penny, aka Sausage. What eventually turned out to be a thyroid problem caused this Dalmatian puppy to grow enormously fat, but the young Boylan (at this point known as Jimmy) carries her around “like an unusually heavy rag doll.” Boylan loves her, despite the dog’s indifference. “I figured, if I kept being sweet to Penny all the time, eventually her heart would open, and she would love me as I loved her. No one told me this is never how it works.”

Matt the Mutt humps everything and everyone, human and non, and knocks people down as they enter the house. Despite being neutered, Matt has lots of sex with Sausage, while James–now in college–mostly avoids it, even though he has opportunities with female classmates.

Next comes Brown, whose perfectly plain (if descriptive) name the Boylans hoped would match a personality boringly normal and sane, as none of their dogs had been to date. But all Brown wants to do is eat her own paws, and so she must spend her days in the Cone of Shame, meant to protect her from herself. “Was Brown not so unlike me, driven to the ends of the earth simply because she could not quite do the thing that she was destined to do?”

Alongside the lives of these dogs, young Boylan wrestles with deeply hidden anxieties–about how well he belongs in “his” body, in an all-boys school, in the world he’s been assigned. James’s mother is a martyr to dog poop, and his father battles cancer. On his deathbed, Boylan Sr. tells his son, “Be the man.” That, of course, is the task James most struggles with.

Boylan describes herself as a gender immigrant, as having a life divided into more or less equal thirds: boyhood, manhood, womanhood. (Boylan makes clear that while some trans people would not use such terms, she does see the earlier parts of her life as belonging to a person others perceived as a boy and, later, a man.) Good Boy is in part a contemplation of these themes: What does it mean to be a man? Is it tied to one’s ability to change the oil in the car, build things, woo women?

In adulthood, Boylan meets the woman she will marry, and they receive from their best man and childhood friend a dog that he can no longer care for. Alex is Boylan’s “guardian angel” and a “unique scholar,” apparently the first well-behaved dog to belong to a Boylan, but one who never gets over the loss of his first owner.

Happily married James adopts a “golden retriever” puppy that turns out to be anything but. This vaguely yellow mutt, Lucy, serves as witness to the beginnings of Boylan’s transition, finding herself and becoming Jenny. Initially distressed by the sight of her owner in dress, heels and wig, Lucy eventually counsels Jenny (in imagined dialogue) that, rather than losing everything, “Some things you will keep.”

Finally, Ranger is the dog of Boylan’s happy, settled life, a loyal black lab with a troublesome inability to avoid porcupines. In these later years, the author reflects on how well her conservative mother had handled her coming out, and Boylan herself must consider how to be the best mother she can be when one of her own children has news to share. Happily, well-adjusted Ranger is there to counsel the whole family as Boylan’s children grow up.

The mature woman who has penned Good Boy has much to reflect upon and lessons to share, many of them couched in the lives of good (and troubled) dogs. “There’d been this puppy I’d loved when I was eleven, but in time I’d turned my back on her, thrown my dog out of bed because her gelatinous sadness was a merciless chain tying me to the person I no longer wished to be.” Boylan’s dogs have taught her about love, and how its unconditional nature flows between humans and dogs. Good Boy is a story, first and foremost, about love, its many forms and the many directions in which we point it and receive it, and about how certain details, like gender, really matter very little in the end. If you have a family–and a dog–that love you, that’s the vital thing.

Rating: 6 cello suites.

Come back Wednesday for my interview with Jennifer Boylan.

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“The Fourth State of Matter” by Jo Ann Beard

Posted on January 24, 2018 by pagesofjulia

At the gracious request of Uriah Pariah, here is a my response to an essay I admire greatly, and more and more every time I read it. “The Fourth State of Matter” appears in Jo Ann Beard’s collection The Boys of My Youth, and you can read it here.

NOTE: This review includes spoilers, and I feel strongly about the reader’s first experience with this essay being a blind read. If you don’t know what it’s about, please STOP now and go read it yourself first before continuing with my lesser words.

I think this post has to include the story of how I came to this essay in the first place. It was assigned reading in Suzanne Paola’s Intro to Creative Nonfiction Writing class at Western Washington University, an undergrad course I took in my early 30s a few years ago, surrounded by people not old enough to legally purchase beer (itself a weird time). Suzanne is a gift to the world and to this art form, but that’s another story. I read the essay she’d assigned without knowing anything about it. So my experience was innocent, like most of the readers (I assume) who first encountered it in The New Yorker in 1996. I have since been assigned the same essay several times, and have read it additional times for “pleasure” (though that’s not quite the right word) and study. I’ll never have that first read again, but it still gets better every time. I wish the same for you.

So, on first read, this is what presented itself to me: the narrator has an old dog, a collie, who is nearing death, in the most sympathetic, almost apologetic fashion. Jo Ann sleeps in fits and starts, between cleaning up after the collie’s incontinence. She has squirrels in her spare bedroom, and her husband has just left her. It’s a rough time. Then we go to work with Jo Ann, and meet her quite likable colleague, Chris. They are quite different–he is a space physicist, she is the managing editor of the space physics journal and vague on the science–but have a genial relationship, so comfortable that I instantly relate, even envy them a little.

This essay is a braid, and a very fine example of that form, but sort of subtle too, because the various braids (and there are several: dying dog, squirrels, estranged husband, work relationships with Chris and others) all come from the same timeline, the present tense of the essay. It’s not clear at first whether they will work as braided fibers or a single story, although I think they come out in a braid, and like the finest such essays, they are tied up together at the end, so that there is a moment of reveal: the reader’s aha, when she sees how tragically these narrative threads are all in fact one.

Because what this essay is “really” about is the 1991 shooting at the University of Iowa, when a graduate student killed five and maimed a sixth before shooting himself. Jo Ann knew the shooter and several of his victims, including her dear friend Chris.

This “real” material comes on slowly, then suddenly. There are foreshadowing moments of darkness, but when the first bullet flies the reader still feels a shock. It felt very realistic to me in this way: it felt like the faculty and students on campus might have felt that day.

Jo Ann goes home in shock. She takes care of the collie dog. She has already had an old friend take care of the squirrels in the spare bedroom. She is surrounded by friends who want to help her, although they don’t know how; her estranged ex-husband (not a sympathetic character) comes around and bumbles some more. Again, the telling feels like what she might have experienced in the living of it. The essay ends on a heartbreakingly beautiful elegiac note, and we are bereft: that this fine piece of art is over, and that lives have been lost, along with the squirrels and the not-quite-yet-dead-but-still-dying beloved dog.

One of the things that struck me most on my first reading was how much the dog affected me. Because, be clear, five people were murdered and followed by one suicide, then another; an additional victim was left paralyzed; a major university was deeply wounded. But the dog. My own old dog has been getting older and less cogent for years now–he’s still going, amazingly, but even when I first read this essay, I could feel his mortality. When we discussed “The Fourth State of Matter” in that undergraduate class, I was a little surprised to learn that nearly everyone had this story, though, about a beloved old dog, dead or dying. Of course, I quickly saw what nonsense it was to think that I had a monopoly on this. It’s a pretty universal feeling. We love our dogs.

Also, though, the essay starts with the dog. Beard’s first line reads, “The collie wakes me about three times a night, summoning me from a great distance as I row my boat through a dim, complicated dream.” My personal impression of this essay is that the collie dog–who goes unnamed, lending her even more of the universal, the ur-dog, the archetypical beloved–stands in for everything else that is lost. The youth and innocent partying of the squirrels, the broken love of the husband, the lives (Chris, who Jo Ann was close to, but also Bob, who she disliked and fought with constantly)–all of this, for me, is contained in the dog. For me, it’s a near-perfect essay, if not perfect. I haven’t even mentioned all the single lines that are crystalline, funny and perfect, as well. Go read it, again.

There have been criticisms. For one thing, Beard plays loose with the facts in characterizing the shooter, Gang Lu, attributing thoughts and feelings to him, supplying some of the content of letters he left behind explaining his actions. On first reading, I gave her the benefit of the doubt, thinking that maybe enough of those letters (for example) had been released to the public to allow her to know what she claims to know in this essay, but that is not the case. I’m so much on board with this essay that I no longer care. Funny, I’m a stickler for truth in nonfiction, until my heart has been won, and then I don’t care anymore. (See also Albert Goldbarth’s “Fuller.”)

Then there is the question of how we write about violence, about trauma, and about other people’s losses. This was the subject of Katie Fallon’s seminar at my recent residency, for which I was most recently assigned this essay, among other lovely pieces of writing. The class was divided, although “The Fourth State of Matter” was not at the center of our discussion–we mostly focused on Brian Doyle’s “Leap,” another piece I dearly love, although my peers are not all in agreement about it. We wonder, with pieces like these, about exploiting trauma, about glorifying violence, about whether to number the gunman in the death count, about when a story is “ours” to write about. We all have different reactions to these questions, and that’s not really what this blog post is meant to be about, but I will say about “The Fourth State of Matter” that I think Beard stays well on the side of writing about her own personal experience of this tragedy. She may not be all in the clear on the question of fact-in-nonfiction, but I think she’s fairly safe on exploiting violence. Again, because she makes it about a dog, some squirrels, and a dear friend. Or, as the original commenter put it when he requested this post: “it’s the fact that it was her story to tell, and a true one at that, that lends it its ultimate power.” That’s why nonfiction, my friend.

Uriah Pariah, thank you for asking me to write this. Hope it’s been helpful.

I already said it when putting together my best-of-2017 post:

Rating: 10 faces of love.

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Maximum Shelf: Lily and the Octopus by Steven Rowley

Posted on May 17, 2016 by pagesofjulia

Maximum Shelf is the weekly Shelf Awareness feature focusing on an upcoming title we love and believe will be a great handselling opportunity for booksellers everywhere. The features are written by our editors and reviewers and the publisher has helped support the issue.

This review was published by Shelf Awareness on May 9, 2016.

Steven Rowley’s first novel, Lily and the Octopus, is a startling, scintillating experience, both funny and emotionally wrenching: a story that shatters all expectations.

lily and the octopus

In the opening lines, narrator Ted Flask introduces his contented home life with his domestic partner, an aging dachshund named Lily. They live in Los Angeles, where Ted works from home, and they are comfortable in their routines: pizza on Sundays, Monopoly on Fridays, talking about cute boys on Thursdays. They have inside jokes, holiday traditions, and an idyllic story of love at first sight. Lily holds up her end of conversations, although as a dog she is of course distractible, and her memory can be short. Her voice is just as we expect a dog to sound. As a puppy (in flashbacks, as in the scene of their first meeting), her breathless enthusiasm comes out in all caps and exclamation points: “IT’S! A! GREAT! TIME! TO! BE! ALIVE!”

As the novel unfolds and Ted fills out as a character, though, it becomes clear that his life is not necessarily well-rounded. He has a therapist he dislikes; he finds her dim-witted, and in his head runs all her advice past his ideal, imaginary therapist. He has panic attacks. His career has stalled. A long-term relationship, ended 18 months ago, continues to haunt him; recent attempts at dating have gone poorly. Until Lily, he worried that he was unable to open up, unable to love. In Ted’s favor, he has a superlative human best friend named Trent, who always comes when called and brings Valium. And, crucially, Ted has Lily. She is the best thing in his disordered and inwardly-turned life.

Those first sentences introducing Lily also introduce the octopus. A new addition to their household, he has a death grip on Lily’s head, and he’s not going anywhere. Like Lily, the octopus talks. Ted wants him to leave, but the octopus will not let Lily go. She begins to have seizures. She weakens.

Ted dreams of an octopusectomy. The vet offers chemotherapy, radiation and surgery, but is not optimistic about Lily’s chances. Ted tries to involve her in the decision-making, but Lily is a dog: her attention span is limited (oh look, red ball!) and, anyway, at 12-and-a-half human years, she has been feeling a little run-down. She rarely speaks in caps anymore. Ted was warned by a vet that, as Lily aged, she would begin to exhibit what he called Enclosed World Syndrome; that is, her perceived world and realm of interest would shrink. It is true, her walks have gotten shorter. Of course, Ted himself has the same malady. As the octopus’s tentacles tighten around Lily’s precious small head, Ted realizes he has a battle on his hands.

It is easy to fear that the market for books about beloved dogs may be flooded, but this one does something new. Lily and the Octopus is its own beast, and the reader is not the same person at the end as at the beginning. In many ways this is the story of Steven Rowley’s life in all its emotional truth, if not in specific, literal details. Ted and Lily’s Los Angeles is a thoroughly realistic setting, but a few elements–most obviously the talking octopus–offer boggling departures. By relying on metaphor, Rowley creates a fantasy world with touches of magical realism, somehow both more affecting and more comforting than reality.

Lily and the Octopus comes with the trappings of humor, canine antics, strong characters and profound emotions. Rowley, who is also a screenwriter, peppers the story with Cate Blanchett, Ryans Gosling and Reynolds, Bradleys Cooper and Milton. Equally prominent are the literary references: Kipling’s jungle, Auden’s “Funeral Blues,” and a reading list to prepare for an octopus hunt: Hemingway, Melville, Patrick O’Brian. The book opens in the spirit of a fun read, but the tone quickly deepens to a sadder and a more intense experience. Ted and Lily’s story centers around relationships: love and life partnership, the nature of commitment and of loss, and what it looks like to fight for one’s friends. As Ted battles the octopus and tries to shore up his darling, he ends up examining every aspect of his own life, his own shortcomings and the strengths he discovers in himself, almost by surprise. His journey, then, is not only about a man and his dog but about breaking out of life’s stalemates. This introspection and interior aspect to the novel is only one of the depths that make it both more than another story about a beloved dog, and more than a whimsical work of fantasy–although it is a superb example of both.

Lily and the Octopus is literary and raw, and relentlessly heartfelt. Questions of who and how we love are at its center and, vitally, the question of how we part. Imaginative, ever-astonishing, suspenseful and wise, Rowley’s surprising novel is thoroughly gut-wrenching, but well worth the pain. With a winning dog at its robust heart, no reader could ask for more.

Rating: 9 moments with the red ball.

Come back tomorrow for my interview with Rowley.

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bonus midday post: on dogs. (and, I have a new author friend.)

Posted on June 26, 2012 by pagesofjulia

I have been a little bit conflicted & confused as to how to tell this story. My new author friend values his privacy highly, and I respect that. I think I’m going to leave him anonymous for the purpose of telling this story. Close readers (rabid followers of this blog & my life, as if there were such people, ha) will be able to figure out his identity, to which I say, okay.

Husband and I got to take a trip this year to see & do lots of amazing, beautiful things, including meet a man who had previously been an email-friend, an author whose book I have admired (still admire) greatly. We’ll call him, um, Larry. Our correspondence had been friendly & stimulating, but there remained the chance that we would fail to hit it off, that there would be awkwardness. However, we did in fact hit it off – all three of us, Husband, Larry and I – and had a great few days of conversation, food, drink, views, and enjoying the world. Larry invited us to meet his wife and their friends; I got to play with his dog. He cooked us dinner – twice! – and welcomed us into his home. It was really something. I’m honored to be treated with such friendly familiarity. And while part of that feeling, of being honored, comes from my admiration of the book this guy wrote, it’s more about simply humanity: that I connected with another human being over the tastes and passions and interests we share. And he gave me a book to read off his bookshelf at home, which is kind of cool. 🙂

When Thomas posted his latest Bits and Bobs post, I guess I was in a lazy blog-reading mood, because I confess I reacted more or less thusly: “books, books, hm… books… gratuitous photos, what? gardens, hm… LUCY!!” More dog is always (always!) appreciated. And that reminded me of an anecdote told by, um, Larry: when his editor was looking over the book, he sent Larry a postcard that said, “less wife – more dog.” Larry’s wife was of course (good-naturedly) a little miffed with the editor! I thought the level of wife in the book was fine – I like the wife – but I think I got what the editor was serving up there: more dog is always appreciated. So, “Larry,” carry on, I love the dog! Thomas, I can handle all the Lucy you care to publish! Here’s to dogs.

my two little dogs after a four-day weekend at the beach: dog tired.

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