Kelly Conaboy - The Particulars of Peter: Dance Lessons, DNA Tests, and Other Excuses to Hang Out with My Perfect Dog

I need to start by acknowledging some guilt I have about all of this. Ive spent the majority of my writing career not writing anything particularly personal, because Im shy and private and the idea of selling my privacy creeped me out, but also because I didnt particularly have anything I wanted to say about myself. (I dont have any delusions, though, that I ever attempted to not be the story. Journalists will rightly gripe when a writer turns a piece about something or someone else into a piece about themselves, and Ill always join in on the griping, because I love a good gripe, but most often when I write about something or someone else, what I want you to notice most are the clever asides; the funny way of phrasing things. Yes, were happy to be taken on this journey about why cinnamon sticks are more expensive than ground cinnamon, but mostly what we like is this charming writer.)

I was also, and maybe still am, pretty sure that in order to write about your life in a funny and compelling way you have to lie, or at least stretch the truth, to make your story seem worth telling; more vibrant and memorable than anyones life actually is. I dont like the idea of doing this, even though I do like reading it. This is mostly because I fear even the lies about my life wouldnt be particularly funny or compelling.

But then I adopted Peter. I want to acknowledge, too, that its very difficult to figure out the vocabulary around the ownership of a dog. I know I dont own him, other than legally. Dog owner feels cruel, and its not something I like to identify as, but it is unfortunately the clearest term, and one I use a few times within the book. Dog guardian, human companion, dog momI think theyre all sort of distracting in their too-obvious attempts to be something other than the one we all know, which is dog owner. I admit that this sucks, and Im sorry. And while were on the topic of language, as far as a pronoun goes, in this book I usually use he to refer to the general dog, because the dog I know bestthe subject of this bookis biologically male. I hate to give men more visibility than they already have, but thats the way it is. I do, however, know dogs can also be girls.

Anyway, after I adopted Peter he became all I wanted to write about. He replaced anything I previously found curious, and anything I was previously interested in. He is my great love and my obsession. My sweet number one man. And you can write about your dog while keeping readers at a distance, to an extent. I wrote about attempting to build a gingerbread house that he could fit inside of; I wrote about how to respond to someone on the street when they pay him a compliment. But what I really wanted to write about was him. Everything about who he is as a dog is interesting to me.

But this proved difficult. Although he is his own being, he is my companion animal, and because we are of different species, and because I am not an expert in dog cognition, the majority of what I know about him is in relation to me. I feel like I do know him deeply, but of course I only know him through the eyes of a human, and I can, for the most part, only talk about him that way. I know how he is when were together. I know how I am, and how Ive changed, in relation to and because of him. I dont think he could be portrayed honestly, the way that I know him, without including bits of myself as part of the story. And I really, really want him to be seen, because I think he is truly special. (Just like your dog is, Im sure, if you have one.) (If you dont have onewhy?) This is not the guilt-ridden part, though, this is just the embarrassing partthat I have to be here, too.

The guilt-ridden part is that I am doing this for money. Im a writer and I love writing, and I love thinking and writing about Peter in particular, but I am getting paid to do this. Its an odd thing about the dog memoir genre. We are ostensibly the ones who love our dogs so much that we are compelled to write thousands and thousands of words about them, but were also the ones, it can be said, who are not satisfied keeping their dogs as what they are: dogs. We turn them into public figures, into content. Worse, we use them as a vehicle to think and write about ourselves. We use them for a paycheck or at least the hope of one. We turn them into work.

Here is something that worries me: Im judgmental about people who use their dogs as fame-grabbing or moneymaking tools on social media. Particularly those who run accounts in the voice of their dogs, the voice usually being something embarrassing like, ooh me mommy she luff to give me yummy good scarfums!like, why do you think your dog talks like that? Jesus. Its hard not to see the dogs being used as a prop in these sort of accounts. An often anthropomorphized version of what a dog is. A means to an end. A tool only for human gain, and not even particularly worthwhile human gain: clicks, followers, favs.

But is what Im doing now that far removed? Im hoping youre thinking