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 Delightfully confessional, it challenges persistent, yet outdated, societal norms about relationships, and finds relief in whimsy, pop culture, and renewed spirituality.
Winner: 2016 AAUP Public and Secondary School Library Selection
ISBN: 978-0-253-01721-5
Available in paperback, Kindle, Nook, and Audible formats
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Indiana University Press
Leave the Dogs at Home is part of the Breakaway Books Series published by Indiana University Press. Book Club Edition.
Random Resistance: A Novel
(Coming soon)
It's a regular Saturday morning for Connie Borders, escorting women arriving for abortions at a Chicago family planning clinic. One anti-choice protester is worse than normal. He calls her by name and says he know where she lives. But she’s not worried, it’s just street theater designed to get under her skin. She knows about street theater. She had been on the other side of the protest line in the sixties.
That story unfolds as Connie's Saturday becomes highly irregular. It starts in 1969 when the outrageous hippies and Vietnam War protesters were making headlines in conservative Indianapolis. Tantalized, Connie tossed aside secretarial school to conduct her own education as instructed by the Whole Earth Catalog. She dove into the anti-war movement, tuned in, dropped out, and experimented across the kaleidoscope of possibilities. From Indianapolis to Chicago to Berkeley and back, in urban and homesteading communes, she navigated the fast currents of electrified sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll. The untrustworthy, raucous times made her fleet-footed and honed a new version of herself.
It's a regular Saturday morning for Connie Borders, escorting women arriving for abortions at a Chicago family planning clinic. One anti-choice protester is worse than normal. He calls her by name and says he know where she lives. But she’s not worried, it’s just street theater designed to get under her skin. She knows about street theater. She had been on the other side of the protest line in the sixties.
That story unfolds as Connie's Saturday becomes highly irregular. It starts in 1969 when the outrageous hippies and Vietnam War protesters were making headlines in conservative Indianapolis. Tantalized, Connie tossed aside secretarial school to conduct her own education as instructed by the Whole Earth Catalog. She dove into the anti-war movement, tuned in, dropped out, and experimented across the kaleidoscope of possibilities. From Indianapolis to Chicago to Berkeley and back, in urban and homesteading communes, she navigated the fast currents of electrified sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll. The untrustworthy, raucous times made her fleet-footed and honed a new version of herself.