Kill the Pet, Kill the Book’s Rating: The Perils of Writing Dogs in Fiction

There are three types of people in the world: Dog people, cat people, and those who like neither (psychopaths). I am, unquestionably, a dog person. I don’t entirely trust cats—they are far too self-assured and independent. I identify far more with the neediness and fierce loyalty of a dog. I have two border terriers—Alby, a five-year-old hooligan, and Otto who is fifteen years old, stone-deaf, partly blind and very shaky on his pins. We adore them both. The next best thing to my hounds is a fictional canine. I grew up with Snoopy, and empathized every time he hunched over his typewriter, failing to get past It was a dark and stormy night…, and Dogmatix—from Asterix and Obelix, who howled like his little doggy heart was breaking every time a tree was felled in the forest. I moved onto Lassie, and spent the next ten years urging various confused dogs to fetch help! My little brother is stuck in a mineshaft. Even as an adult, I loved the rescue dog Six-Thirty, from Bonnie Garmus’s novel, Lessons in Chemistry . It’s no surprise, then, that in each of my three novels a canine plays a major role. If I’m going to spend two years immersed in a fictional world, I want a world that includes a dog. A really great dog. Dogs can be a wonderful literary device: we discover a lot about our main character’s thoughts and feelings by what they tell their dog in a quiet moment. Dogs can be a wonderful literary device: we discover a lot about our main character’s thoughts and feelings by what they tell their dog in a quiet moment. And in fiction, as in real life, the way a person treats a dog tells us an awful lot about them. I had great fun playing with this truth in my new novel— How to Age Disgracefully . In one of the very first chapters, an elderly dog is left orphaned, and three of my main characters agree to share her care. However, they all have very different ideas of how to look […]

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