In 2018, the celebrated Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgaard wrote what he found to be a surprisingly concise work for The New Yorker Magazine that the worst thing that can happen to a writer – even worse than hemorrhoids or an active Instagram account – is owning a dog.
“I was never interested in dogs,” he confessed, explaining that he was afraid of them as a child and only got one later in life when his young daughter insisted. He resented the dog’s presence in his house, not only because “he pulled on the leash as hard as he could, dug holes in the lawn and was never properly house-trained,” but because he gave him – a man who can seemingly write about any subject, no matter how mundane, and always at great length – writer’s block.
“In the two years we had it, I didn’t write a single line of literary prose,” he complained, adding, “I don’t blame the dog” – before pretty much doing that. (About a year later, in 2020, he published a new novel, The Morning Starwhich comprised 688 pages: No more writer’s block.)
I first came across Knausgård’s article on my phone while sitting on a park bench on a hot summer’s day, my own dog crouched in the shade below me, refusing to move. Like Knausgård, I’m a writer, but where he’s Manchester City in the literary rankings, I’m Accrington Stanley. While I love the solitude of the writer’s life, I’m also aware of how claustrophobic and inevitably introverted it can be, especially when the four walls of the home office become too confining after a few hours.
I came to terms with the reality of owning a dog for the first time for the same reason, after my daughters repeatedly asked me to. But unlike him, I was immediately hooked and took the opportunity to step away from my hot laptop in the afternoon to find not only distraction but new inspiration.
At the local dog park – unkempt, ordinary, on the outskirts of a south-west London suburb – I found it bustling with life. Here, over the next few years, I would witness his endless human drama, for dog owners, especially the afternoon dogs, are a talkative bunch.
My social circle consequently expanded to include, among others, a stoned martial arts fan, a chain-smoking animal medium, and a guy with eczema and arthritis in a motorized wheelchair who told me stories about architecture, art history, and his wife, who was going through a divorce from him.
I witnessed acts of compassion, like the women who came together to help another escape an abusive relationship and who later worked to free a domestic helper from her cruel employers. There was the elderly man who lived with his adult daughter in a cramped apartment next to a huge St. Bernard and a tiny Chihuahua. “Bernie eats the baseboards, but the Chihuahua is the boss.”
And I saw such tender kindness, like that Christmas Day when one of the regulars, Elizabeth, came to the park to bring the lonely Pavlov, with whom I had been walking, a turkey with all the trimmings, still piping hot in a little tower of Tupperware containers. “For me?” Pavlov said, tears in his eyes.
If I were to write about these everyday interactions in my new memoir, People who like dogs like people who like dogsbecause I felt I could not not. There was so much to tell, such diverse characters and even some unlikely escapades. With a dog you never get bored. They are programmed to sniff out stimuli and take us along with them.
In it New Yorkers In his article, Knausgaard claims – not without a wink – that no “good author” has ever owned a dog, but then admits that Virginia Woolf actually had one. “But only lap dogs that are too small and don’t count.”
What he may have deliberately overlooked was the fact that some of the most moving and popular books of recent years have been about the dynamic between humans and animals. It’s a subject that never seems to fail to fascinate us.
We speak a different language than our pets, but it’s when we try to find a way to communicate that the bond between us can become so strong. I think we each appreciate the effort the other makes. Animals teach us what it means to be human.
I had a soft spot for such stories long before I started writing my own. I was fascinated by Lost catfor example by the great American essayist Mary Gaitskill. As the title suggests, Lost cat (2020) is about Gaitskill adopting a cat in Italy and bringing it to America, where it disappears.
British journalist Kate Spicer did something similar with Lost dog, Published in 2019, an intense account of her bond with a greyhound who has a habit of running away. When he escapes again, Spicer roams the city streets looking for him, half mad with grief. I have never read anything more gripping, and I have read Lee Child.
One of the most moving memoirs I have ever read was Ordinary dogs (2011) by the late Irish literary critic Eileen Battersby, about how two rescued dogs came into her life and changed it for the better. Elsewhere, 2022’s groundbreaking debut novel, Bonnie Garmus’ Chemistry lessons, showed nothing less than a talking dog.
“People seem to really respond to books that have an animal character in them,” the American writer Sigrid Nunez told me for this newspaper last year. Nunez, then 72, had felt underappreciated for much of her career until her 2018 novel The friend everything changed.
The story of a middle-aged woman caring for a friend’s Great Dane in a cramped New York apartment became an award-winning bestseller. Nunez was stunned. When I told her that the success was probably because the book was so well written and so loving, she replied: all her previous books were of comparable quality.
“It’s because of the dog,” she said firmly. “I was teaching creative writing at Princeton and writing at the same time. I told my colleague – the brilliant writer Jeffrey Eugenides – about it and that it was partly about a dog, and he said it would be a huge success. Because of the dog. I thought it was ridiculous, but he was right! There is something about the bond between dog and human. It appeals to people.”
Animals teach us that the world does not belong to us alone, and through them our worlds become bigger
Helen Macdonald, memoirist
And not just dogs. In 2015, memoirist Helen Macdonald published H stands for Hawka book about how the nonbinary author turned to nature and adopted a hawk to cope with the death of his father. It followed a rich literary tradition of books about the healing properties of a life shared with animals, including Gavin Maxwell’s Ring of bright water (1960) and Richard Mabey’s Naturopathy (2005).
“After my father died, I felt very lost,” Macdonald tells me. “When I got the hawk, I almost felt like I was a hawk myself, like I was out in the mud with him, catching rabbits and pheasants.” They laugh. “It was all very wild, a beautiful time in my life, but also very dark. Through my grief and through the hawk, I learned a lot about death, but also about humanity.”
Macdonald and later Nunez never imagined that their book would become a literary sensation that would lead to the publication of several other books of a similar nature, including Charlie Gilmour’s Bonnet (2021), a touching account of fathers and magpies.
“I believe that animals let us see the world through their eyes,” says Macdonald, “although of course that’s an act of imagination because we can’t really know what it’s like to be a dog out there sniffing every blade of grass. But they teach us that the world is not ours alone, and through them our worlds become bigger.”
Personally, I never really wanted a dog. I’m a cat person. But I quickly adapted. Missy, my Border Terrier, was a blessing to me for many reasons. I had no idea that she would broaden my horizons so much, nor that she would bring me such unlikely new friends.
I ended up writing about the connections I made with other dog owners, because I felt that if I was having these enriching experiences, surely others were, too. Perhaps it’s a story with universal appeal: how in a world increasingly defined by loneliness and social isolation, there is a way we can still connect by forming a bond with an animal and seeing where it takes us.
Incidentally, Knausgaard overcame his writer’s block by giving the dog away to “a family that loves dogs.” Mine isn’t going anywhere. She’s earned her keep.
“People Who Like Dogs Like People Who Like Dogs” by Nick Duerden is now available
