Life and Leisure

Dog people, and now a 'dog-oir'

(New York Times)
Updated: 2010-11-05 07:48

There are dog people, there are people who read dog books and there are people who write dog books. (Many of them.)

Julie Klam, author of a new memoir, You Had Me at Woof, is, at least in part - and in part to her chagrin - all three.

When she got her first dog, at 30, Klam worried that people would see her as a "dog person". You know, she writes, "the kind who can only attract a companion who relies on her for food."

The warning signs were there: "The more time we spent alone, the more I thought he was just like me," she wrote about adopting Otto, a Boston terrier. "It was the best relationship I'd ever been in."

Did this seal her fate as a single woman with a dog, sending out holiday cards with Otto dressed as Santa Claus?

As it turns out, No.

Klam, who recently turned 44, now lives in New York with a husband, daughter and, yes, three dogs.

When her first memoir, Please Excuse My Daughter, was published in 2008, Booklist called her spoiled and "ill-equipped to cope in a world where growing numbers of women are gainfully employed". But Klam comes across as disarmingly down-to-earth and readily amused in equal measure, bemoaning the high rents that chased her into Upper Manhattan.

On a walk to the Morris-Jumel Mansion, a nearby historic site, Klam unflappably held fast to three leashes in one hand as Beatrice, her antisocial Boston terrier, and Beatrice's adopted and mixed-breed siblings, Wisteria and Fiorello, lurched along. In her former neighborhood, on the Upper West Side, Klam was frequently mistaken for a dog walker; here, she travels largely unnoticed. Occasionally, someone asks if she's selling any of them.

Klam describes herself as a moderate - "between the crazy animal people and the people who see pets as disposable".

Yet here she is, author of what she somewhat abashedly calls a "dog-oir". Despite gonzo sales, it can be tricky to enter the genre, professionally speaking.

"I think dog books give certain people a framework for what are very strong relationships," Klam says.

When Otto died, Klam was eight months pregnant and lost weight.

"I was destroyed by it," she says. But when she explained the situation to her obstetrician, "her response was, 'Oh, I'm a cat person'."

"Dog books are invariably heartbreaking or heartwarming, and that's OK," says Klam's friend, Denis Leary, the actor. "But Julie's not sappy at all, and that's reflected in her writing."

Leary gamely appears in the You Had Me at Woof book trailer shot by his wife, Ann, a spoof on the notion of dog whisperer.

"We call it the Dog Mutterer," Klam says.

Klam's means may not be cutesy, but her message is in earnest. The book's subtitle is "How Dogs Taught Me the Secrets of Happiness".

Chapters have self-help titles like "How to Listen to That Still, Small Voice".

Within six months of adopting Otto, she writes, she grew up. "He made me see that I could compromise with somebody I loved," Klam explains.

"His presence made it easier for me to trust myself, to be responsible, and ultimately, to be able to find a human form of Otto to be with."

Six years later, she married Paul Leo, who was not then a dog person.

"When we met, Otto slept in my bed and Paul was like, 'I don't want this,"' Klam recalls. "I really didn't want Otto and Paul together in my bed either."

She and the canines eventually won Paul over, despite the frequent rotation of dogs in their home, a result of her volunteer work with the Northeast Boston Terrier Rescue Group, an organization that coordinates the adoption of lost and abandoned dogs - thereby providing fodder for some of the book's more amusing and harrowing tales.

Next up is a memoir about her friends and the impact of social networking on friendship.

New York Times