Animal crackers: The rise of pet memoirs

In the UK’s The Independent an article reports on the growing popularity of pet books. Here’s how the article kicks off:

How do you make a grown man cry? A swift kick in the gonads might do the trick, but if you’re more of a long-game player, you might prefer to lend him a copy of Marley and Me, the memoir by the Pennsylvania journalist John Grogan of “life and love with the world’s worst dog”. “I’ve heard from police officers, firefighters, construction workers,” says Grogan, “men who wouldn’t want to be seen crying over a death in the family, or on the job, because it would show weakness. And they all tell me they wept like a baby at the end of the book.”

Marley and Me, about Grogan and his young family’s experiences with the titular Labrador, was first published in 2005. The book sold six million copies, and has now been made into a movie starring Owen Wilson and Jennifer Aniston as Grogan and his wife Jenny. It’s also the pre-eminent example of a publishing phenomenon – pet lit.

Later in the story literary scout Louise Allen-Jones said:

Wolves have featured in several. There has been a book about a tortoise. There’s even one about hedgehogs… I’m hoping that pet memoirs will replace misery memoirs on the bestseller lists. Maybe animals are going to cheer us all up.

<sigh> It’s times like these I wish I had an out of control Labrador named Marley as the inspiration for a blockbuster book.

For the full article click here  Animal crackers: The rise of pet memoirs