Book(s) Review: Starter Dog by Rona Maynard and A Three Dog Life by Abigail Thomas

They're not really about dogs. Yes they are. But they're also not.

I lie when highlighting just two titles. I’m actually going to write about three memoirs, not only the ones above but also Abigail Thomas’s more recent book, What Comes Next and How to Like It—a title too long to fit in the headline.

All are connected. All involve dogs, and while the dogs are important characters, these three memoirs are really about life in the aftermath of change. How we reinvent ourselves. What opportunities are out there, what joys, what obstacles, what defeats.

We’ve all faced—and will keep facing—the ending of one part of our lives and the beginning of another; moments when we can’t imagine what comes next but it happens anyway. Marriage, break-ups, illness, a birth or death in the family: they can leave us flailing. In these books, both Maynard and Thomas try to define what formed them, who they’ve become and, most importantly, how they’re changing once again in response to major new challenges, whether they like them or not.

In both memoirs, Abigail Thomas faces major trauma. In Three Dog Life, her husband Rich chases their dog into a New York City street. Rich is immediately struck by a car and suffers a life-changing brain injury. In her more recent memoir, What Comes Next and How to Like It, Thomas grapples with a shocking betrayal by her best friend. Meanwhile, Rona Maynard’s book chronicles a more existential challenge: how to find purpose in life as we age.

As Starter Dog opens, Maynard has ended her a celebrated career in magazines. Known across Canada as the editor of the influential magazine Chatelaine, she has made headlines, made careers, made the most of a glamourous life, although in her memoir, she admits to moments of imposter syndrome.

Maynard was born in the U.S. into a difficult family—and it’s very easy to disappear down rabbit holes reading about their dramatic and well-chronicled lives. Rona’s father, Max Maynard, taught English at the University of New Hampshire, where one student, at least, called him an inspired teacher. (In writing about Max, historical writer J. Dennis Robinson also said he triggered Robinson’s sole paranormal experience.) Yet it was Max Maynard’s curse that he only ever wanted to be a painter when, in journalist Robert Fulford’s account, he lacked talent. He was also an alcoholic, often charming and always unpredictable, self-important, self-pitying and self-involved. Rona’s mother, Fredelle Maynard, eventually kicked him out.

Not that Fredelle was any easier a parent, as Rona writes in an earlier memoir, My Mother’s Daughter, published in 2007. With her Radcliff PhD, Fredelle cherished hopes of the academic career that her husband had landed. But as a woman born in 1922, she faced not a glass ceiling but a near-impenetrable wall of bricks and mortar that kept her out of the ivory tower. Instead, Fredelle found work writing for women’s magazines, eventually moving back home to Canada and publishing two books, in the meantime raising her daughters, Rona and Joyce.

Yes, that’s writer Joyce Maynard, who lived with J.D. Salinger when she was 18 and he was 53, groomed into his hermit’s cave by Salinger in 1972 after he read an article she’d written in the New York Times about what it was like to be young. Apparently he liked to be reminded.

You can Get Starter Dog here.

Rona Maynard laces this family background throughout Starter Dog as she sets out to re-invent herself post-Chatelaine. As the book opens, she’s seeking a Project, capitalized to show the extent to which she imbues her search with both purpose and irony. Her husband has a less ambitious ask. He wants a dog. Her spouse of more than 40 years, former publishing executive Paul Jones, had a much-loved mutt when he was a kid, and he’s always wanted another. They’re in their 60s. Why wait?

Mess, Maynard thinks. Demands. Less ability to travel during their retirement. But Jones wins her around, and they adopt a two-year-old rescue dog trained by convicts in a U.S. prisoner rehabilitation project. More or less trained, as it turns out. They name him Casey Jones. Their vet tells them that Casey is mainly beagle: 40 pounds of exuberance, loyalty and poop, obsessed with chasing squirrels, affectionate—at first, mostly toward Paul—tawney, strong, and while eager to please, at heart a Monty Pythonesque creature: a Dog of Very Little Brain. They are smitten.

After Casey has been with them a very short time, Maynard has a significant dream, which she tells Jones felt hyperreal: she could even see the cabbage roses on the wallpaper. In the dream, Maynard is back to being 19 years old and lying in a narrow bed with a beautiful young man bending over her. She wears a tight wetsuit, and knows that she is about to fall in love. The man is short but neatly-made, with a powerful chest and a head of ginger hair. He has the zipper of her wetsuit between her teeth and is slowly pulling it down.

What was that about?

“In less than a minute,” she writes, “Paul had the answer. ‘Ginger hair, smallish, neatly made, powerful chest. Sure sounds like Casey to me. Isn’t it obvious?’

“If Paul was right, I’d spent 65 years in an emotional wetsuit. I wanted him to be wrong.”

The memoir is a chronicle of the ways in which Paul was right. Maynard and Jones have already downsized out of their house in tony Rosedale into a downtown condo, but she hasn’t yet connected with her new and very miscellaneous neighbourhood. Dragging her toward homeless men holding out biscuits, forcing her to talk with fellow dogwalkers from every imaginable background, Casey pulls Maynard into a sense of both community and humility.

Once she was invited to glitzy banquets with the Queen, dressed in designer clothes, and boasted a state-of-the-art wine cellar. Now, in her sweatpants, she is frantically trying to find out what has happened to a local disabled man, sketchily housed, confined to a wheelchair, whom she has come to care for as she walks Casey. Another day, she’s on her knees scrubbing Casey’s diarrhea off a front walk before the homeowners can step in it. The book is the chronicle of Maynard’s emergence from her wetsuit cocoon into the freedom and generosity that can come with age; a freedom that isn’t automatically granted but must be earned. This ends up being Maynard’s Project, and she tells the story with wisdom, good-humour, honesty and grace.

Next: Abigail Thomas’s memoirs, and what she and Rona Maynard have to teach (thankfully between the lines.)

My own memoir, Foreign Correspondences: A Traveller’s Tales, is available here.