Claire Arbogast
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        • Tick Acres
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Leave the Dogs at Home: A Memoir

​Claire and Jim were friends, lovers, and sometimes enemies for 27 years. In order to get health insurance, they finally married, calling their anniversary the "It Means Absolutely Nothing" day. Then Jim was diagnosed with cancer. With ever-decreasing odds of survival, punctuated by arcs of false hope, Jim's deteriorating health altered their well-established independence as they became caregiver and patient, sharing intimacy as close as their own breaths. A year and a half into their marriage, Jim died from lung/brain cancer. Sustained by good dogs and gardening through the two years of madness that followed, Claire soldiered through home repairs, career disaster, genealogy quests, and "dating for seniors" trying to build a better life on the debris of her old one. Leave the Dogs at Home maps and plays with the stages of grief. Delightfully confessional, it challenges persistent, yet outdated, societal norms about relationships, and finds relief in whimsy, pop culture, and renewed spirituality.
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Book Club Edition
Winner:
2016 AAUP Public and Secondary School Library Selection


ISBN: 978-0-253-01721-5 
Available in paperback, Kindle, Nook, and Audible formats


Buy your copy or a gift online:
     Amazon
     Barnes & Noble
     Indiana University Press

Leave the Dogs at Home is part of the Breakaway Books Series published by Indiana University Press. 


excerpts

reviews
photos


​Random Resistance: A Novel

(Coming soon)
​In the powerful chaos of antiwar protests, racial divides, and hippie counterculture, a young woman discards many realities to find her own maverick truth.
Read more about it.

​Follow Claire Arbogast on Facebook, Instagram (clairearbogast), and Twitter (@claire_arbogast).
Check out photos
connected to the Leave the Dogs at Home story here.


  • Home
  • About
  • Blog: Inside Stories
  • Books
    • Random Resistance
    • Leave the Dogs at Home >
      • Excerpts from Leave the Dogs at Home
      • An illustrated guide to the stories inside Leave the Dogs at Home >
        • Tick Acres
        • Jim
        • Lila and Digs
        • Bloomington and Surrounds
        • Waterloo, Pennsylvania
        • Virginia
        • Cabo
        • Thailand & Taipei
        • Six Years Later, New Tricks
      • Additional Reading
      • Events
  • Contact