[N]ot really a guide to grief; it’s for anyone searching for what will make him or her happy—and more importantly, what will not.--Kirkus Reviews
An excellent choice for those touched by grief, ready for a change, or just wanting to read a beautifully written memoir. --Library Journal Winner: 2016 AAUP Public and Secondary School Library Selection ISBN: 978-0-253-01721-5 Book Club Edition Leave the Dogs at Home is part of the Breakaway Books Series published by Indiana University Press. |
Buy your copy or a gift in
paperback, Kindle, Nook or audiobook: Morgenstern's Books in Bloomington (usually in stock, if not they can order), 849 S. Auto Mall Rd.,(812) 676-7323 Juniper Art Gallery (usually in stock, if not they can order) in Bloomington, 615 W. Kirkwood Ave., (812) 822-1663 Amazon Barnes & Noble Indiana University Press |
Leave the Dogs at Home: A Memoir
|
Claire and Jim were friends, lovers, and sometimes enemies for 27 years. They prized their independence. Were sure that pre-retirement marriage would mean absolutely nothing except better health insurance. Good thing, because Jim was diagnosed with cancer. With ever-decreasing odds of survival, punctuated by arcs of false hope, Jim's head-first crash into the medical system toward death ripped up the boundaries of their unconventional relationship. Forced to become caregiver and patient for year and a half, they shared intimacy as close as their own breaths. Then Jim died as his lung cancer mercilessly spread to his brain. His illness and death changed first the character of their love and then the shape of Claire’s world. Relying upon good dogs, serial gardening, and gritty roots, she stumbled upon unexpected personal freedom in the rubble of grief shaped by home repairs, career disaster, genealogy quests, and geezer dating. 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 Delightfully confessional, it challenges persistent, yet outdated, societal norms about relationships, and finds relief in whimsy, pop culture, and renewed spirituality. |
From the author:
The death of an eclectic husband and loss of a contrary love leads unexpectedly to a better life. A trip with two good dogs through the insightful, funny, upheaval of home repair, career disaster, serial gardening and geezer dating. The idea for this memoir came after throwing down the last in a succession of sappy grief books. Disgusted with tales that pandered to the myth of perfect marriages, lovely husbands, and predictable arcs of grief, I knew the rest of us with messy, complicated relationships and non-PC styles of grief needed an antidote. Unconventional in every way, Jim and I were friends, lovers and sometimes enemies for twenty-seven years. He was a man who loved ideas, and that made me love him. A difficult man who found love the most uncomfortable idea of them all. We finally married, for health insurance, but called our legal bonding “It Means Absolutely Nothing.” Less than two years after we married, he died from cancer. His illness mutated our long-term arm’s-length relationship to one of caregiver and patient with a wrenching intimacy. More importantly, Jim's death forced me to face up to the hard, evasive truths of our relationship and my connection to the world around me. This vibrant, witty, and unflinchingly confessional book challenges the norms about love and grief. It’s the kind of real truth you only hear at the kitchen table with a glass of wine. The book is deeply connected to the land and the working of soil - gardens, nature, and place operate as a metaphors of the brute hand of life and its yielding cycles of healing. The story is set in and around Bloomington, Indiana, with rich descriptions of the quirky community, and chapters that take place in Boxerwood Garden and Highland County hills of Virginia, the harbor of Lockeport in Nova Scotia, the byways of Waterloo, Pennsylvania, the streets of Bangkok, and the seaside Hacienda del Mar resort in Baja, Mexico. |