a three dog life: choices about staying in one place in time. also: did we need the dogs?

Dear Homies in 226,

some words that come to mind for A Three Dog Life :

little windows into a world.

deep and cutesy.

picaresque.

did I need the damn dogs?

the center doesn’t hold

Some expanded notes on these words:

Little windows: It wasn’t until page 92, when Thomas writes, “For now, he will look at the paper and I will look at him and let what’s over and done with disappear in the here and now,” that I considered that she might be deliberately, subtly doing in her book what her husband faced in his post-brain trauma life: giving us only the present, not the past or the future.

I’m not sure if this is what she’s doing. I’m not sure if she is, if it works. But it’s a fascinating idea for structure. I think it would’ve worked better for me as a reader if I’d been clearer that she was doing it- if she’d told me directly, one way or the other. This way, sometimes it works; sometimes it just feel vague, and like she’s choosing to stay on the surface of her topic most often.

What compelled me the most about this memoir was when Thomas talks about the very concrete facts of how life and her relationship with her husband is post his accident. The strengths of the book for me were her small scenes painted boldly. “No” was an especially strong chapter in this regard. It’s a clear example of choosing to slow down time by focusing on small details and objects.

What didn’t work for me was that, while some of her life with and without Rich is made up of the small quotidian details of life, a lot of it isn’t. The world that Rich lives in, and that she inhabits with him, is fascinating to me, and I feel like I didn’t get enough of it. I wanted more plot, more action, more dialogue. I wanted less semi-cutesy thoughts about nettles and dogs. Another author could’ve made these details work for me, but I was left with a ’so what?” feeling after those chapters. Often I wondered what they were doing there. I felt like sometimes she edited her words to be simpler, more fit for Real Simple and the other anthologies and magazines some of these pieces were first published in.

Speaking of structure, plot and tension: I spent the whole memoir waiting to see if Rich would die. As I read, I was expecting a dramatic build up to- either he gets better, or he dies, or he gets worse. I felt like this was an ongoing, hinted-at but unexplored subject of the book. When she didn’t give this to me- when the end of the book finds her with more of some of the same sweetness she’s found with him throughout, and then on the next page we get “Rich died on such and such a day”, I felt cheated, and I felt like the book ended abruptly. I understand that writing about his death must’ve been painful, and that it’s her choice to tell or not, but leaving it out made the book less than it coudl’ve been.

Dogs: Instead of the overarching narrative structure being about Rich- is he going to get better, worse, die? – I felt like the overarching narrative structure was the dogs, and her relationship to them. And it wasn’t enough for me. I liked what Thomas showed me about how it felt to be a woman in midlife and then older, living alone, the hidden joys of doing so- but I wanted more, and more than stories about her dogs. Some of them worked; some of them (like her chapter about her dog going into heat) were skillfully written but I didn’t necessarily feel they contributed to the story Thomas was trying to tell. It felt too cute. It felt like there was another, richer story underneath.

I loved the small windows: I just wanted her to take more risks, go deeper, give us everything, in using them.

- Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha