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 and Dogmatix—from 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 Even as an adult, I loved the rescue dog Six-Thirty, from Bonnie Garmus’s novel, .
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. 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— In one of the very first chapters, an elderly dog is left orphaned, and thr.
