Ink of emotion

Nothing says loneliness quite like the distant bark of a dog on a moonlit night.

As John Grogan, a 51-year-old father of three, sits talking in his 18th-century farmhouse in Pennsylvania, the barking comes from the next room and this evokes a certain melancholy. It is a labrador but it isn't Marley. It is Marley's replacement, Gracie.

Marley was “the world's worst dog'', a labrador who had “a heart as big as all outdoors'' and a sincere, if often unsuccessful, desire to please.

Grogan had been a columnist on a local newspaper for years when Marley died of old age in 2003. He wrote a touching column on his dysfunctional labrador. In his inbox the next day, there were more than 800 e-mails. Grogan had touched a nerve.

He decided to turn his anecdotes about Marley into a book. Selling six million copies, Marley & Me became a publishing phenomenon.

Part of the explanation for the mass appeal of Marley & Me is its sentimentality and its tendency towards anthropomorphism.

But the book is also an open and raw account of a marriage. The couple bought Marley as a child substitute when they were humming and ha-ing about whether they were ready to have children. Later, three baby Grogans came along and Marley adored them.

Grogan has a new memoir out, of which he is proud. The Longest Trip Home is about growing up as a mischievous altar boy, one of four children in a devoutly Catholic childhood home in the suburbs of Detroit.

Grogan's prose style is conversational, while the humour is gentle. The theme, well, it simply asks whether a child can ever rise to the expectations of his parents.

“So many autobiographies in recent years have been misery memoirs but they don't appeal to me. Mine isn't one of those. It is about an ordinary family.

"The easy course for me would have been to write a Marley sequel but I didn't want to do that. I wouldn't have found it rewarding.

"I don't pick my topics, the topics pick me. This one about childhood was gnawing away at me. I think it is a bigger story. To my mind writing Marley & Me was the warm-up act,'' he says. “If I had to figure out how to write a book that would sell in millions, I wouldn't have gone for Marley & Me.

"It was a story that bubbled up inside me and I wrote from the heart. I never thought about the market.''

He is often approached by people desperate to tell him their dog stories.

“The number of people who feel the need to seek me out with their funny dog stories amazes me.''

He reckons men like it because it is about a man who isn't ashamed to be emotional. The emotional punch in his new book concerns his father's death from leukaemia.

Grogan signed his $200,000 book deal for Marley & Me at the same time as his father was told his illness was terminal.

Heart and soul

The last months of Richard Grogan's life and his death in 2004 at 89 are a central part of The Longest Trip Home. “The process I went through — coming to terms with his death — is what many people go through,'' Grogan says.

Ultimately, his father's fanatical Catholicism created a rift. Grogan failed to share his parents' strict faith. As a family they tried to avoid the subject but the religion that bound the young John to his parents separated the adult John from them.

When he moved from Michigan to Florida the distance also became geographic. The “trip home'' in the title describes his attempts to cross both divides.

As he was writing this memoir, Grogan came to understand better his distant relationship with his father.

“To fully appreciate the first 13 years of my marriage I had to try writing Marley & Me and the same was true with my father and this book,'' he says.

“I wasn't sure where all these anecdotes were going to take me but as a story arc began to build I began to see with more clarity what was worth writing about. I found out quite a lot about myself.

"I also came to realise that my father was a very gentle man. Even though we didn't agree on lifestyle choice, his moral code was stamped indelibly in me.''

The scenes when his father is dying are moving. Did he agonise about their intimate nature, given that it was his father's death he was describing this time?

“I have been writing about my experiences as a columnist. What I was careful not to do was tell other people's stories. My experiences of my dad were mine to tell but I didn't want to tell my siblings' stories. My goals were to be honest and respectful of my family.''

Graham Greene said a writer needs to have a little chip of ice in his heart and Grogan can relate to this. “If you start worrying about what people will think, it will stop you [from] writing.''

That said, there is a genre of memoir-writing that allows a certain licence to exaggerate for comic effect.

“But after 25 years as a journalist, I can't bring myself to do that. I can't embellish or exaggerate. I think what I do is make the most out of what I have.''

Anecdotes, of course, become polished with time.

“Yes, there comes a point where you can no longer remember whether the version you tell is the correct version. I went through that self-examination. As a rule, if I can't answer that question I leave it out.''