posted June 12, 2012 06:32 PM            

Pack of Two: The Intricate Bond Between People and Dogs

At the age of 36, Caroline Knapp, author of the acclaimed bestseller Drinking:A Love Story, found herself confronted with a monumental task: redefining her world. She had faced the loss of both her parents, given up a twenty-year relationship with alcohol, and, as she writes, "I was wandering around in a haze of uncertainty, blinking up at the biggest questions: Who am I without parents and without alcohol? How to form attachments, and where to find comfort, in the face of such daunting vulnerability?" An answer materialized in the most unlikely form: that of a dog. Eighteen months to the day after she quit drinking, Knapp stumbled upon an eight-week-old puppy at a local animal shelter, took her home, and named her Lucille. Now two years old, Lucille has become a central force in Knapp's life: "In her," she writes, "I have found solace, joy, a bridge to the world."

posted June 12, 2012 06:37 PM            

“The fact of the matter is, I like not knowing how Lucille experiences the world, I like the mystery of living with a dog. There is something deeply rewarding about the moment when she and I manage to transcend the language barrier, to reach across the boundaries of species and communicate with one another, understand what the other wants and feels. But there is something equally rewarding about honoring the moments when we can’t.”

– Pack of Two, Caroline Knapp

. . . . . . . . . . .

“Living with a dog–trying to understand a dog, to read his or her behavior and emotional state–is such a complex blend of reality and imagination, such a daily mix of hard truths and wild stabs in the dark.”

– Pack of Two, Caroline Knapp

________________________________________________________

I read a selection from Pack of Two in the wonderful anthology, Dog Is My Co-Pilot several months ago. I liked the late Caroline Knapp’s gently humorous and honest style. In that excerpt, she talks about the prejudice that a single woman with a dog faces over a single man with a dog. I don’t have the quote in front of me, but the jist of her argument is: People watch a single man playing with his dog in the park and think, “That’s so sweet. Look at them having a great time together.” But people watch a single woman with her dog and think, “Poor lonely woman. She is projecting on that dog. She must really want a baby.” Kind of funny, but true! The injustice!

Anyway. I was happy to find a copy of Knapp’s full book, Pack of Two, which tells the story of her breakup with two significant relationships: Her long-time boyfriend and alcohol. Knapp decides to make a better life for herself as a single woman. On a whim, she adopts a sweet and wolfish-looking German shepherd mix, whom she calls Lucille.

Lucille quickly becomes the center of Knapp’s entire universe. The rest of the book is split into meditative chapters about the profound emotional roles that dogs play in our lives. This is primarily a book about a woman’s deep and ineffable bond with her dog. While Knapp does mention a few men, it is a book by, for, and about crazy dog ladies.

Knapp is a skillful writer and the book was enjoyable to me. I also identify as a Crazy Dog Lady and found myself nodding along with many of her points. My only reservation with the book is that a lot of it comes across as Knapp trying to make excuses for her undying attachment to her dog. She writes as if she needed to apologize or compensate for something. Clearly, she has faced judgment from a lot of people because of her unwavering devotion to her dog, and she writes about that, but she doesn’t seem to have been able to get over it quite yet. It’s kind of a small complaint, because I really did enjoy this book, but it just left me hoping that Knapp found a place of contentment with herself and with her love for Lucille.

posted June 12, 2012 07:00 PM            

'Let's Take the Long Way Home': Life, literature and dogs

Writer Caroline Knapp was 42 when she died, seven weeks after being diagnosed with lung cancer in 2002.
She's best known for Drinking: A Love Story, her 1996 memoir about life as a "high-functioning alcoholic." But she also wrote Pack of Two (1998) on why people, including herself, are so attached to their dogs.

And it was dogs — not books — that connected Knapp with book critic Gail Caldwell, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 2001 for her reviews at The Boston Globe.

Theirs is "an old, old story: I had a friend and we shared everything, and then she died and so we shared that, too," Caldwell writes in the opening sentence of Let's Take the Long Way Home, a heartbreaker of a memoir.

If grief can ever be graceful, then Caldwell gracefully weaves a thread of stories that describe and ponder friendship and loss.

Caldwell, who was nine years older, writes of Knapp: "For years we had played the easy, daily catch that intimate connection implies. One ball, two gloves, equal joy in the throw and return. Now I was in the field without her: one glove, no game. Grief is what tells you who you are alone."

They first met at a party, but became friends walking their dogs in Cambridge, Mass. They were close for less than a decade, but made up for lost time:

"Finding Caroline was like placing a personal ad for an imaginary friend, then having her show up at your door funnier and better than you had conceived," Caldwell writes. "Apart, we had each been frightened drunks and aspiring writers and dog lovers; together, we became a small corporation."

Both loved books. Each, coincidentally, had stopped drinking at 33. But it was their passion for their dogs (Knapp's shepherd mix and Caldwell's Samoyed) that built their common ground.

Wisely, Caldwell limits shop talk about writing. On meeting Knapp, she writes, "I was more interested in her dog than her book sales. So was she."

With humor and sadness, the memoir celebrates an intimacy between two strong-minded, single women — although Knapp married her on-and-off-again boyfriend while dying in the hospital.

Caldwell is at her best not about herself (her 2006 memoir, A Strong West Wind, already covers her rebellious childhood in the conservative Texas Panhandle) but about Knapp, her death and their dogs:

"Death is a divorce nobody asked for; to live through it is to find a way to disengage from what you thought you couldn't stand to lose."

Old dogs, she writes, "can be a regal sight. Their exuberance settles over the years into a seasoned nobility, their routines become as locked into yours as the quietest and kindest of marriages."

I suspect it's the kind of introspective book that will attract mostly women readers. If so, that's a shame. Men could learn from it.

"Men don't really understand women's friendships, do they?" Caldwell once asked another friend.

"Oh, God, no," the friend replied. "And we must never tell them."

But Caldwell does just that.
http://www.usatoday.com/life/books/reviews/2010-08-26-caldwellrev26_ST_N.htm?csp=Books

_____________________________

posted June 12, 2012 09:10 PM            

"My human relationships are unpredictable, sometimes volatile, always subject to complication and flux. But my dog stays the same, her reactions to me constant. In a sea of changeable emotions and circumstances, she is a small anchor, a steady presence who bears witness to the most private details, the monumental shifts and incremental changes, who remains right there.

"Dogs represent the one relationship in life where consistency is never questioned, never doubted, never compromised by the vicissitudes of human moods and circumstances and priorities. And so we get to experience something else that's rare in human affairs: trust.
"This is the only nonpolitical relationship I have ever had..."

“The dog’s agenda is simple, fathomable, overt: I want. “I want to go out, come in, eat something, lie here, play with that, kiss you. There are no ulterior motives with a dog, no mind games, no second-guessing, no complicated negotiations or bargains, and no guilt trips or grudges if a request is denied.”

“Living with a dog is like being followed around 24 hours a day by a mute psychoanalyst. Feelings float up from inside and attach themselves to the dog, who will not question their validity, or hold up your behavior to scrutiny, or challenge your perceptions.”