Dog's tale unleashes canine passion

[DoozyDog]

Dog's tale unleashes canine passion

BY AMY S. ROSENBERG
Knight Ridder Newspapers

From everywhere, people are coming to him with their dog stories. There are the dysfunctional-dog stories, the loopy-dog stories, the confessional-dog stories, the weepy I-had-to-bury-my-dog stories.

They are forgetting, or not caring, or often relishing, that pretty much everything he did - except the part where he doesn't get rid of the dopey-yet-lovable yellow Lab named Marley - was probably the opposite of what he should have done.

"If there's any advice I have, it's `Don't do what I did,'" says John Grogan, Inquirer columnist and author of "Marley & Me: Life and Love With the World's Worst Dog"? (HarperCollins). "I don't hold myself in any way to be an expert."

But, what the heck, Grogan's take on Marley has propelled him to the top of best-seller lists and into a role as a sort of guru to grieving mongrel owners or, in Grogan's words, "unofficial chairman and spiritual leader of the dysfunctional dog owners of America."

Naturally, there's been a bit of a backlash from a few outraged dog people who, in noting Grogan's self-described ineptitude in training the goofy, disaster-prone Lab, conclude, as did one writer on Amazon.com: "This dog deserved better."

Posthumously, at least, Marley is getting some pretty rarefied treatment. Even for the ever-popular genre of dog book, with a built-in audience of Lab lovers (146,692 at last count) and Grogan column readers, Marley & Me has struck more than the typical chord as it barrels through the competition much like a Marley in a china shop.

Twelve weeks after being published, Marley & Me hit No. 1 on the Publishers Weekly best-sellers list (it's at No. 3), No. 4 on the New York Times' nonfiction best-sellers list - where the neurotic Marley is in a virtual dead heat with books on Abe Lincoln (Doris Kearns Goodwin) and globalization (Thomas L. Friedman), but still trailing Jimmy Carter - and No. 1 on the Wall Street Journal list. It has become a real "love fest," HarperCollins publicist Seale Ballenger says.

The book, a breezy, funny, entertaining but intimate memoir with a very cute picture of the cocked-head puppy Marley on the cover and a sensible price tag ($21.95), was a huge Christmas seller and has sold about 325,000 copies; it is in its 17th printing. At a November book-signing at the Chester County Book & Music Co., "people bought stacks of them," says Thea Kotroba, the store's events coordinator.

This is so much more than a book thing. Readers are posting pictures of their own dogs on Amazon.com and on the "Marley & Me" Web site (http://marleyandme.com) and, acting on the dubious assumption that there is endless interest in Marley-like, kicked-out-of-obedience-school sagas, sharing theirs.

One poster said that reading the book made her feel that she was "part of a great community of non-expert dog owners and their canine friends who fumble through life together."

From the beginning, regional sales reps dubbed the book "Tuesdays With Marley," after the best-selling tearjerker "Tuesdays With Morrie" (dying former teacher and wise person) by newspaper columnist Mitch Albom of the Detroit Free Press. Albom's book topped the best-seller lists for three years.

But Kathy Simoneaux, co-owner of the Chester County, Pa., bookstore, says the Morrie comparisons go only so far. "It's much more of a realistic book," she says of Marley. "It's not a dog sitting and spouting off cliches, like Morrie does."

Yeah, Marley would never stoop to that.

HarperCollins marketed the book with gusto. It planned events with dog clubs and invited the dogs, too. It sent out Frisbees and special stuffed-animal Marleys, plus boxes of tissues to underscore the book's heartbreaking conclusion, when Grogan goes out to bury his dog after Marley's long, sad decline (although one Amazon poster took issue with Grogan's decision to leave Marley in a kennel near the end while the family went to Walt Disney World).

Lorraine Shanley, a principal at Market Partners International, which tracks publishing trends, says people have been publishing dog books forever, not to mention tearjerker memoirs, but, she says, striking the right combination to hit it big can be elusive.

"Generally speaking, dog lovers are a ferocious bunch," she says. "Obviously there is a lot of identification with this book." Focusing on the human side of the relationship - and chronicling how the dog's life intersects with crucial life passages - has great boomer appeal, she says.

"Marley & Me" has also tapped a burgeoning sub-genre of the pet-book industry: the bad-pet book, a category traditionally populated by cats. This spring, Villard is publishing a similar memoir from Berkeley, Calif.-based Bark magazine's humor columnist, Lee Harrington, titled "Rex and the City: A Woman, A Man, A Dysfunctional Dog."? (In this one, the dog doesn't die.)

Bark editor Claudia Kawczynska says the number of dog books being published has gone from a trickle a decade ago to a flood these days. Bark's own anthology - "Dog Is My Co-Pilot" - reached the extended best-seller list of the Times in 2003.

"The whole `The dog is a bad dog, the dog is loving, we can work with the dog' thing is so much more true to life than the tributes to the wonderful dogs," Kawczynska says. That's probably what sets Marley apart from many of the books, she says.

Beyond the dog people, Grogan says he has heard from women who have miscarried, as did his wife, Jenny - described in intimate detail early in the book (afterward, manic Marley stops racing around for once and puts his head in her lap); struggled with fertility problems (Marley kills the moment during one attempt at conception with some panting milk-bone breath; the next day, Grogan takes him to get fixed); and experienced postpartum depression (Jenny literally beats up on Marley during one bout of despair).

In the end, Grogan says, the book is about a young family feeling its way, and about basic human/canine values such as commitment and the ability to tolerate imperfection. They never give up on Marley, despite his "lifelong pattern of phobic, irrational behavior," not to mention some ghastly events at a dog beach - and become philosophical ("In a dog's life, some plaster would fall, some cushions would open..."). Marley offers some big life-and-death lessons - "live each day with adolescent verve and spunk" - territory plowed to great success by the treaclier Morrie.

Grogan says readers - even your basic yuppie, bobo Lab owners - are also coming clean with the real passion they feel for their dogs. The impetus for the book, in fact, came from a column he wrote after Marley's death that brought 800 responses.

"You don't have to be one of those nutty dog people to feel this sort of deep emotional bond and real grief when you have to say goodbye," Grogan says. And so he's been patiently listening and reading everyone's stories about their dogs.

(Of course, we bored him with stories of Zeus, our dumb but gentlemanly golden retriever mix whose notable achievements include facilitating a midnight chocolate cake party for a dying Jack Russell, helping himself to an entire Chinese meal left on the counter, and having his life completely run by another Jack Russell puppy named Spot, himself known to hide behind light poles to avoid going back inside after a walk... .)

Oh, yeah, back to Marley. Or maybe not. Grogan says his next book is about his father, and has nothing to do with dogs (although he has yet to fully vet this concept with his publisher). "I don't have another dog book in me," he says. His current dog is Gracie, a gentle, well-behaved Labrador retriever.

"There's no book in this dog," Grogan says.