Leave the Dogs at Home (Book Club Edition)
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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. Book Club Edition. |
Leave the Dogs at Home Reviews
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2016 AAUP Public and Secondary School Library Selection
"Arbogast delivers a raw and honest narrative of her life as a lover, a widow, and a woman. . .The theme of death and life, both literally and figuratively, are navigated with such emotion, it seems natural to empathize with the author in sadness, joy, love, and uncertainty as her longtime companion (later husband) Jim combats cancer. . . An excellent choice for those touched by grief, ready for a change, or just wanting to read a beautifully written memoir." --Library Journal "By the time I finished reading Leave the Dogs at Home, I felt sure I was holding a future classic. The best thing about Claire Arbogast, besides her wonderful writing, is her hard-headed sense of intimacy and her stubborn determination to live a life of love—whatever craziness and jury-rigging that might require from the heart." --Bob Shacochis, author of The Woman Who Lost Her Soul, 2014 Pulitzer Prize finalist "In this stunning debut, Claire Arbogast infuses death with life, giving readers both the gut-punch of grief as well as the warmth of a life well lived. Candid, powerful, and unrelenting, Arbogast’s pain becomes our pain, and her love becomes our love." --B.J. Hollars, author of This Is Only a Test "Claire Arbogast rewrites the stages of grief in this raw, sometimes unsettling, always compelling memoir that takes us backward and forward in time from the moment her intense, complicated husband is diagnosed with terminal cancer. Leave the Dogs at Home challenges the conventional wisdom about love, marriage, loss, survival, and grace in ways that are bound to make you think about your own life." --Barbara Shoup, author of Looking for Jack Kerouac and An American Tune "Life, just as a garden, does not have to be perfect and neat to be complete. Leave the Dogs at Home serves as a prime example of how a humble experience in the outdoors can come to our aid in times of need and healing." --Bruce W. Bytnar, Managing Director, Boxerwood Nature Center and Woodland Garden "Leave the Dogs at Home mines the messy, graceful territory of life lived in the midst of upheaval; the roughness and tenderness of it all. Sharp and engaging, this beautiful memoir invites us to think about resilience and reconnection with the strongest parts of Self." --Beth Lodge-Rigal, Creative Director, Women Writing for (a) Change of Bloomington, IN "Leave the Dogs at Home is a memoir for and about adults and their very real lives. Claire and Jim take nearly a lifetime to move into marriage only to discover Jim has terminal cancer. But this is not so much a book about grief as it is about love. Readers will share that love and arrive at the end both stronger and wiser." --Jesse Lee Kercheval, author of Space: A Memoir and My Life as a Silent Movie "This very personal memoir is a gift of insightful reflection on how weathering difficult situations and transitions can help us grow and transform and blossom again. The vivid imagery and flowing words were a healing balm. Claire Arbogast has had the courage to find her voice, her true being, and share it." --Gwen Bottoms, Aging to Sage-ing Facilitator "Claire Arbogast's deeply moving memoir records with honesty and clarity how she managed to move forward with her life despite the death of her husband. Her story beautifully depicts the aftermath of deep personal loss." --Carrol Krause, author of Showers Brothers Furniture Company: The Shared Fortunes of a Family, a City, and a University |
A debut memoir about death, grief, rebirth, and gardening.
"Like the real world, the beginning of the book and Arbogast’s descriptions of her husband Jim’s impending death are tough going. As she reflects on their 27-year, on-again, off-again relationship, she paints a picture of two people who were unable to commit. When they married, they insisted that it “meant absolutely nothing.” Neither wanted a real relationship. The marriage was just for insurance purposes, and he didn’t want her to tell anyone about it. Though they married in early spring, Jim didn’t move into their house until winter. They had bought the house together a few years earlier, two acres out in the country with two big dogs. But Jim didn’t always share with her—not the information about his lymphoma or his skin cancer years earlier. He also waited months before telling her about his lung cancer, a result of his exposure to toxic chemicals during the Vietnam War. They went through lung surgery, brain surgery, chemotherapy, radiation, and all the other possible treatments, but Jim eventually succumbed to the cancer. Arbogast’s story of rebuilding, or perhaps starting, a life has a persistent thread: her gardens. While dealing with her grief, she tore out gardens, added new ones, and changed entire landscapes, all the while thinking about moving to town. A few trips with and without the dogs, finding her roots, dating, and a new business dogged her search for a new direction in life. She was able to move on when she realized that her relationship was not necessarily as amazing as she once believed. [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 |
"I selected Leave the Dogs at Home as the reader for my first-semester composition course because I hoped my students would relate to a regional author’s work. I anticipated that every student would have some experience dealing with cancer, but I was surprised at how engaged they were with the text’s environmental issues and views on marriage. All my students had something to say about Claire’s unconventional relationship with Jim, and Arbogast’s story made them think critically about love and societal expectations around coupling. The memoir served as a provocative catalyst for collegiate discussion and thoughtful response writing."--Lisa Siefker Bailey, PhD, Indiana University Purdue University Columbus.
"Leave the Dogs at Home is a genre-busting memoir of grief and survival. Claire Arbogast, a former marketing executive who lives in Bloomington, recounts how, in her mid-50’s she survived the death of her husband and built a new life. This could be the subject for hundreds of self-help books, but Arbogast’s rugged, honest account is as fresh, inspiring, and unconventional as she clearly is. Arbogast and her husband, Jim, had been an on-again/off-again item for 27 years before finally marrying, they said, for insurance reasons. Less than a year into the marriage, Jim became ill with cancer. As Arbogast and Jim fight the disease, she skips the usual self-pity, anger, despair, and rage at doctors, hospitals, and the cancer itself. She and Jim get on with their lives, even taking a trip to Nova Scotia, Canada. When Jim finally succumbs, Arbogast, a fierce gardener and the daughter of florists, decides she will turn “the microbes of decay” to her own advantage and embarks on ambitious landscaping schemes. As she takes on flooding, marshy land, and a septic field, she cultivates new aspects of herself. Despite the couple’s dismissive claim about their marriage of convenience, Arbogast writes that “a mystical gold cord” had linked them “solar plexus to solar plexus.” So, though she is resourceful and resilient, grief undoes her at times, and she has to fight it as vigorously as she uproots remorseless invasive species in her garden. But she proudly relates that she has emerged from her bleak grief headed not just to a “different life, but a better one and a better me.” One anecdote perfectly captures Arbogast’s joyful, gritty, irreverence. Immediately after Jim dies, she presents several close friends with frog garden sculptures, saying, in words she and her husband had rehearsed, “Jim wanted you to have this for helping him while he croaked.” Arbogast’s memoir, like Jim’s frogs, is a gift to her readers." --By Julie Gray, Bloom Magazine August/September 2015 |