Thursday, January 26, 2006
Dog-eared bestseller
At left, John Grogan and Marley, the unruly dog that inspired a best seller.
Everyone has a favorite dog in their past (mine was Frisky), and, if they're lucky, their present as well (my favorite "adopted" dog friend right now is Sasha - as i don't own her). And of course, there will always be plenty of dog stories - this one ended up being a national best seller. Enjoy.
The New York Times
January 26, 2006
Belatedly, a Bad Dog Finds His Forte: Selling Books
By DINITIA SMITH
LOWER MILFORD TOWNSHIP, Pa. — Why this dog and no other? Why has "Marley & Me," the story of an overly friendly, wildly energetic, highly dysfunctional yellow Labrador retriever, spent the last three months on the best-seller lists, climbing to the No. 2 spot on the forthcoming New York Times hardcover nonfiction list?
"I was pretty confident the book would be big, but not this big," said John Grogan, the book's author and Marley's owner, sitting in his large brick house surrounded by fields and woods in rural Pennsylvania. So far, "Marley & Me," published by William Morrow in November, has sold close to 500,000 copies. It is now in its 20th printing, with 870,000 books in print, the publisher said.
As readers of the book know, Marley is dead, but as Mr. Grogan, a columnist for The Philadelphia Inquirer, said, "Marley's ghost is everywhere."
"Here, he was locked in here," he said, opening the basement door. He pointed to where Marley had scraped at the wall with his claws and gnawed at the door frame trying to escape. "The wood door frame was totally gone to the studs," Mr. Grogan said. ("He was an obnoxious greeter of guests," he explained later. "For the sake of our company, unless they were really, really good friends, we would lock him there so they could come over without being slobbered on.")
Then he walked over to another spot where Marley had scraped at the drywall and gnawed at the wood corner piece. "I sanded it and filled it with putty and painted it," he said.
Marley was, in a way, a dog who loved too much. He would hurl himself through screen doors to get to Mr. Grogan or his wife, Jenny Vogt. When they locked him in a metal dog crate, he separated the steel bars.
"It looked like the Jaws of Life had pulled it open," Mr. Grogan said. Marley flung drool on guests. He stole Ms. Vogt's underwear. He ate her jewelry. Thunderstorms gave him anxiety attacks, and then he would chew through things, mattresses, the couch.
But "Marley & Me" is not just a book about a dog. In fact, it is a love story, of Mr. Grogan and his wife, a young married couple contemplating having a family. "We were young," the book begins, irresistibly. "We were in love." Ms. Vogt was nervous about caring for a baby and thought a dog "would be good practice," Mr. Grogan writes. A breeder offered them a discount on a puppy. "The little guy's on clearance," Ms. Vogt begged her husband as Marley somersaulted into their laps, gnawed on their fingers and clawed his way up to lick their faces.
Reviewing the book in The New York Times, Janet Maslin called it "a very funny valentine to all those four-legged 'big, dopey, playful galumphs that seemed to love life with a passion not often seen in this world.' "
"It's a book with intense but narrow appeal," she continued, "strictly limited to anyone who has ever had, known or wanted a dog."
The book follows the couple through their efforts to have a child. When Ms. Vogt suffered a miscarriage, Marley seemed to mourn with her.
"His tail hung flat between his legs," Mr. Grogan writes, "the first time I could remember it not wagging whenever he was touching one of us. His eyes were turned up at her, and he whimpered softly."
When their three children did arrive, he became their guardian, delicately licking their faces and ears, allowing them to crawl all over him. The problem, Mr. Grogan writes, was not keeping Marley from hurting one of the babies, but keeping him out of the diaper pail.
After Marley died in 2003, Mr. Grogan wrote a column about him for The Inquirer and was stunned when he got 800 responses from other dog owners. He thought Marley's story might make a book and wrote a proposal; the final manuscript was sold to Morrow for $200,000.
Lisa Gallagher, William Morrow's publisher, said she began to suspect the book would do well when she noticed staff members passing it around among themselves. Morrow printed nearly 6,000 readers editions and sent them to booksellers. It also gave away copies at last June's BookExpo America, the industry trade show, in New York. In a nod to the book's tearjerker qualities, the company distributed tissue with Marley's image on it at regional bookseller meetings; it also sent Frisbees with the book's title on them to stores.
Dan Mayer, who buys pet books for Barnes & Noble, was enthusiastic about the book because, he said, it is "more of a memoir." And then there's the book's cover, a photograph of Marley as a puppy looking appealingly up at the reader. "It's really hard to walk past the cover of this book and not want to pick it up," Mr. Mayer said. Barnes & Noble chose "Marley" for its Discover program, which earns a book prominent display space in the company's stores and on its Web site, reviews in in-store brochures and often priority for advertising and author readings.
Of course, a large part of the book's appeal is that Marley was a very, very bad dog. And the book is a lesson in unconditional love. The Grogans tried obedience school, but Marley was expelled. They sent him again, and this time he came in seventh in a class of eight. The dog behind him was "a psychopathic pit bull," Mr. Grogan writes. Marley ate his own obedience certificate.
These days, Marley lies buried in an unmarked grave in the garden at the edge of the woods. The Grogans now have a successor, Gracie, who is 18 months old. She is a female Lab. Like all Labs, she is exuberant and high-spirited.
"But what she has is what Marley didn't have," Mr. Grogan said, "the ability to calm down."
"We call her the anti-Marley," Mr. Grogan said.
Here's the Offical NYT book review:
The New York Times
October 13, 2005
Books of The Times | 'Marley & Me'
Honoring the Best Bad Dog a Family Could Ever Have
By JANET MASLIN
When John Grogan and his wife traveled to Ireland, they left behind the third member of the family: Marley, their Labrador retriever. Mr. Grogan wrote a six-page "Marley memo" for the dog sitter. This document nicely captures the pet's personality.
Vitamin pill: "The best way to give it to him is to simply drop it on the floor and pretend he's not supposed to have it."
Beverages: "His jowls hold a surprising amount of water, which runs out as he walks away from the bowl."
Obeying commands: "It's best if you're standing and not crouched down when you call him." Sedatives for thunderstorm phobia: "One pill 30 minutes before the storm arrives (you'll be a weather forecaster before you know it!)"
Mr. Grogan knew the workings of Marley's mind. He makes that abundantly clear in "Marley and Me," a very funny valentine to all those four-legged "big, dopey, playful galumphs that seemed to love life with a passion not often seen in this world." It's a book with intense but narrow appeal, strictly limited to anyone who has ever had, known or wanted a dog.
"Marley and Me" tenderly follows its subject from sunrise to sunset, from the ball-of-fluff stage to the heartbreaking farewell. In every chewed-up stereo speaker, busted screen door, purloined grilled cheese sandwich and bouquet of decapitated flowers, Mr. Grogan finds more about Marley to love.
So this is a dog with a dark side. After all, the book's subtitle is "Life and Love With the World's Worst Dog." As Mr. Grogan found out when he described Marley that way in The Philadelphia Inquirer, where he is a columnist, that distinction is hotly contested; one reader said her Lab, Jason, was better qualified because he once ate a whole vacuum cleaner hose. Still, Marley was a strong candidate, and the book describes his qualifications with hilarity and affection.
As newlyweds, the Grogans were naïve enough to fall for Marley, the bargain puppy in his litter, without meeting his father. All they knew was that this Lab was a purebred. "This was my first time rubbing shoulders with anything resembling high breeding, my own family included," Mr. Grogan writes.
Only later did they realize that the "frothing, mud-caked banshee" seen briefly at the breeder's house might account for half of Marley's genes. So it made sense that Junior was rambunctious from the start. "It took him just one day to discover the best thing about his new home: toilet paper," the book recalls.
For the book's purposes, the Grogans became dog parents at the perfect time: their lives are eventful over the course of this story. At first they were carefree enough to devote their full attention to Marley, to the point where Mr. Grogan had time to speculate about his dog's inner thoughts. They often appeared to be: "Go ahead! Pick it up! Drool all over it! Run!"
Things changed when the author's wife became pregnant. (The Grogans now have three children.) The dog's way of celebrating was to eat part of the pregnancy test kit. "Sorry to disappoint you, pal," Mr. Grogan told him while retrieving it, "but this is going in the scrapbook." Other items wrenched from Marley's jaws during the course of this story ("so that's where my comb went!") include a paycheck and a gold necklace. The necklace incident ended happily. Maybe you don't want to know how Mr. Grogan got it back.
Only occasionally does "Marley and Me" contrive sitcom-ready situations. It's hard to believe that the author, even in the most amorous mood, could have mistaken Marley's warm breath for his wife's until he smelled Milk-Bone biscuits. And the image of a man being slurped on a moving toboggan by a pesky dog is too cartoonishly good to be true - unless the reader realizes how much universal Lab behavior is immortalized here. When Marley lands a movie role and finds a new way to mess up his walk-on-a-leash scene in each successive take, Mr. Grogan's description has a riotously authentic ring.
Eventually a shadow falls over this story. Though the book is full of tail-thumping enthusiasm, there comes a time when Marley just can't shred the furniture any more. "I coaxed him along, calling out words of encouragement, but it was like watching a toy slowly wind down as its battery went dead," Mr. Grogan writes, about walking with Marley up a familiar hill. "Marley just did not have the oomph needed to make it to the top."
But Mr. Grogan describes even his dog's decline in terms of mischief. Though losing his hearing, Marley could (and did) still steal food from the kitchen counter; he just couldn't tell that he was about to be caught in the act. The book continues to record his antics. But it also captures the four-hanky nobility of Marley's struggling through his last days.
Mr. Grogan keeps the book agile by sticking to Marley-centric episodes and by locating a crazed bit of Marleyness in any event he describes. He admits with shame that even while reporting on the second anniversary of the Sept. 11 crash of United Flight 93 in Shanksville, Pa., he could not keep the love and loss of Marley off his mind.
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