Good Boy

Score: 4/5 Bookmarks

Thank you to Celadon for gifting me a review copy of Good Boy: My Life in Seven Dogs, a memoir by Jennifer Finney Boylan.

Initially, I thought ‘well this book isn’t going to be for me’, because I’m more of a cat person. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve met a few dogs I like just fine, but overall the slobbery neediness just isn’t for me. I was happy to be wrong though, I enjoyed this book immensely. Boylan is hilarious, and her dry sense of humor really brought this book to life.

One of my particular favorite passages near the beginning of the book is:

“One friend of mine has a dog that is kind of like a miniature sloth, with unsettling bits of dried-up Alpo congealed into the fur around its mouth, a creature whose paws for reasons I do not understand can never touch the ground and who must be carried like a clutch purse from spot to spot. She calls him her “little man.” She’s always telling me about how much Bingo loves her, how Bingo’s the only one who understands her, how her life would be empty were it not for the radiant adoration little Bingo sends forth.”

My mum, while maybe not quite as extreme, had a period of time when she refused to travel to come to see her human children because she didn’t want anyone else looking after her fur baby. And I’ve had many similar friends and family over the years.

I’m getting off topic though. Good Boy is the story of the author’s boyhood, and then subsequent womanhood later in life. Boylan tells this story, split into time periods accompanied by the dogs she’s owned. She talks about how the dogs we choose actually reflect a lot about us.

You do have to stay on your toes while reading this one. It moves quickly and can be a little choppy and frenetic at times, but it certainly isn’t dull.

I chuckled every time the author attributes particular thoughts to the dogs and the way she anthropomorphized them. This book was as moving as it was entertaining and it’s a definite thumbs-up from me.

Synopsis:

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’s in the love of dogs, and my love for them, that I can best now take the measure of the child I once was, and the bottomless, unfathomable desires that once haunted me.

There are times when it is hard for me to fully remember that love, which was once so fragile, and so fierce. Sometimes it seems to fade before me, like breath on a mirror.

But I remember the dogs.

In her New York Times opinion column, Jennifer Finney Boylan wrote about her relationship with her beloved dog Indigo, and her wise, funny, heartbreaking column went viral. In Good Boy, Boylan explores what should be the simplest topic in the world, but never is: finding and giving love.

Good Boy is a universal account of a remarkable story: showing how a young boy became a middle-aged woman—accompanied at seven crucial moments of growth and transformation by seven memorable dogs. “Everything I know about love,” she writes, “I learned from dogs.” Their love enables us pull off what seem like impossible feats: to find our way home when we are lost, to live our lives with humor and courage, and above all, to best become our true selves.