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    Dog Years: A Memoir
    Dog Years: A Memoir
    Dog Years: A Memoir
    Ebook209 pages3 hours

    Dog Years: A Memoir

    By Mark Doty

    4/5

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    About this ebook

    A Washington Post Book World Best Book of the Year

    Winner of the Israel Fishman-Stonewall Book Award for Nonfiction

    "Tender and amusing. . . . Doty brilliantly captures the qualities that make dogs endearing." -- The New Yorker

    When Mark Doty decides to adopt a dog as a companion for his dying partner, he brings home Beau, a large, malnourished golden retriever in need of loving care. Joining Arden, the black retriever, to complete their family, Beau bounds back into life. Before long, the two dogs become Doty's intimate companions, and eventually the very life force that keeps him from abandoning all hope during the darkest days.

    Dog Years is a poignant, intimate memoir interwoven with profound reflections on our feelings for animals and the lessons they teach us about living, love, and loss.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateOct 13, 2009
    ISBN9780061842436
    Dog Years: A Memoir
    Author

    Mark Doty

    Mark Doty's books of poetry and nonfiction prose have been honored with numerous distinctions, including the National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN/Martha Albrand Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and, in the United Kingdom, the T. S. Eliot Prize. In 2008, he won the National Book Award for Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems. He is a professor at the University of Houston, and he lives in New York City.

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    Reviews for Dog Years

    4/5

    122 ratings12 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Mark brings Beau home from the shelter when his partner Larry is dying. Beau joins Arden, their black retriever. There is so much joy in the book, but also so much loss (both human and canine.) For anyone who has loved (and lost). The chapters are almost like short essays. Have tissues nearby, for your tears of joy and sadness.
    • 5/5
      Amazing, deeply felt, beautiful writing
    • 4/5
      I borrowed this ebook from my local library and pretty much read it in a single sitting. As Mark Doty shared his story I laughed, I teared up, and having recently lost my own dog, I related to it.Mark and his partner Wally, are dads to Arden, a black Retriever. Wally has AIDS and is bedridden and dying. He was the one closest to Arden and the dog now sleeps in his bed, rarely leaving his side.Although some thought it was not a good idea to bring a new dog into the house while his partner is terminally ill, Mark winds up going to the shelter and adopting Beau, an underweight, yet rambunctious Golden Retriever. Not too long after, Wally passes away leaving Mark and the dogs behind.During a time of devastating grief over the loss of his partner, Mark says his dogs gave him the will to live. They needed him to care for them just as much as he needed them. Mark gives glimpses of his daily life with his dogs and with the new man in his life, Paul, whom he starts dating a year later.As the years pass, dogs Arden and Beau both start to become ill. When Arden was sick and Mark described the visits to the vet and how he was trying to save him but deep down knew the end was near, I truly teared up. Then there were moments I laughed out loud, like when one woman took one look at Arden, who was obviously an older dog and getting towards the end of his life, and she makes a comment about how it's all part of the cycle of life. Mark shares the colorful reply that popped in his head but that would be too rude to say aloud. I'm not surprised to see the author has published poetry as there is a distinct poetic flair within this candid memoir. I also enjoyed the Emily Dickinson snippets and references throughout.Overall, I found Dog Years to be an interesting, heartfelt memoir and a lovely tribute to Mark's dogs. "Somehow, memory, seems to slight a word, too evanescent; this is almost a physical sensation, the sound of those paws, and it comes allied to the color and heat of him, the smell of warm fur, the kinetic life of a being hardly ever still; what lives in me."-at 79.8% e-copy, Dog Years: A Memoir by Mark Dotydisclaimer:This review is my honest opinion. I did not receive any type of compensation for reading and reviewing this book. While I receive free books from publishers and authors I am under no obligation to write a positive review. I borrowed my copy of this book from the local library.
    • 4/5
      I thought the book was beautifully written. There are parts that, in my opinion, are works of art. It was interesting, funny and made tears stream down my face. I loved it.
    • 3/5
      dog years offers some compelling reading, but the author lost me when he refused to ignore his partner's words and so left a small, starving female dog on the street of San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. She had chosen him. He rejected her.As he wrote, he could fairly easily have taken her, but decided not to show the compassion for whichhe readily faults others throughout his book. If she would not have worked well with Arden, he couldhave advocated for another good home in New York City or beyond.
    • 3/5
      poetic and philosophical memoir about the author's life with his dogs.
    • 3/5
      Poetic. Not a light-hearted dog memoir.
    • 5/5
      This is an amazing book. It is sad throughout. If the book were a painting, and you can imagine sadness as a color, the entire background would be that color.

      However, the purpose of the book (in my opinion anyway) is to point out that sadness is just the background, while life is the foreground, the real object of the painting. Sadness just provides context that makes the reality of life even more vibrant.

      We will all experience loss in varying degrees throughout our lives. It doesn't really matter what we believe happens after someone dies, there is still a hole they once occupied. One measure of our connection to others and our humanity is how willing we are to make room for more holes. After all, what could be more humane than to accept someone into our lives who we know will eventually leave a hole?



    • 4/5
      After the beginning pages, which were a little tedious, I really loved this book. I'm not a dog person, but the deaths of his dogs brought real tears to my eyes.
    • 4/5
      Memory of Sam, our golden, who looked very much like the cover, led me to grab this book. Seeking support for my memories got in the way of the rich language and personal loss of a partner in the beginning. Once it dawned on me that this is a book about presence and passing, not only did memory and emotion return, they became enlightened by new facets of meaning.
    • 3/5
      When I picked this book up, I expected it to be a memoir about Doty's life with his two beloved dogs. I certainly didn't expect it to be a rumination about life and loss and the ways that grief pushes into your life and holds on. But that is indeed, in many ways, what this is. Arden and Beau, the dogs of the title, just offer a central focus for the philosophical musings put forth here by Doty, a poet and memoirist. His relationship with his dogs is the scrim through which he recalls the slow decline and death of his partner from AIDS. And the dogs weave in and around his eventual relationship with his new partner as well.But there's an interrupted feel to the writing here with chapters dodging and weaving about with no clear sense of timeline. Of course, starting the narrative with Doty's philosophical conception of dogs and language followed swiftly by the death of Beau, it is clear that this will not follow a conventional timeline or a conventional memoir's path. His writing tries a little too hard to capture poetry in prose and in the end ended up alienating me. I am a sucker for animal stories and yet this one elicited very little response, perhaps because it was more about Doty's cumulative losses and his grief than about the dogs. His dogs clearly meant the world to him but the sometimes overly florid writing and the intrusion of so much else detracted from their stories. Although Doty claims that his dogs helped to lift him from depression and grief, there was very little uplift here, overwhelmed as it was by depressing outpourings on the ephemerality of life and the certitude of loss. As a reader, I needed a more focused narrative, a smoother integration of his life as a gay man both facing the loss of a beloved partner and finding a new love as well as showing more of the concrete, never-wavering love of his animals. Some animal lovers have praised this book highly while others have panned it so I seem to be fairly alone in thinking it was just an okay read. I did struggle a bit with the style and the disjointedness of the narrative but underneath it all, there was some good bone structure. I had just hoped for more out of it than I found.
    • 3/5
      I would give this three and a half stars if I had the option. The jacket copy makes it sound like this is a memoir of the author's partner's death, but it is much more stream-of-conscious than linear, and "about" a lot more. Doty goes back and forth between memories, at first I found this a bit jarring but I either got used to it or it got smoother, more like a friend relating stories over beer.
      Doty writes wonderfully (he is a poet, after all). He also writes for other dog lovers - something he admits, charmingly, about 2/3rds through the book. I enjoyed DOG YEARS a great deal.

    Book preview

    Dog Years - Mark Doty

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