Good Boy: My Life in Seven Dogs
Written and Foreword By: Jennifer Finney Boylan / Narrated By: Kelsey Navarro
Length: 7 hrs and 42 mins
Okay, so where are the dogs?! Other than that, heartwarming
Hmmm, has the dogs juuuuust enough so that Good Boy is still a decent enough Animals Pick for the week. But oh my goodness, does it hop around in time, bounce from one dog to another, or what?
I hadn’t realized that this is only the latest in author Jennifer Finney Boylan’s memoirs, so I s’pose that’s why I felt a little bit lost at times, a bit out at sea as tho’ I’d just stepped into a conversation that was in mid-delivery.
It does start at the beginning (And by the way, if you’d like to see the actual pups that Boylan is talking about, they’re pictured on the Amazon review page) with Boylan feeling a bit lost, growing up in a mostly happy home. She and her sister are a trifle on the outs until she discovers her talent for mimicry, at which point, in their teens, Sis drags Boylan before her friends and has Boylan perform outLANdish impersonations. Where once Boylan was left on her own (Their parents were aaaallll about watching her sister at horse shows), now she and her sister are a bonded unit, something she’ll miss desperately whenst Big Sis goes on in her life and grows up and starts a family of her own.
The dogs are indeed spoken of, a bit, but mostly to talk about how grossly dysfunctional and odd the lot were. Whether it was the first Dalmatian, Playboy, being a One Person Dog (And that one person most certainly was NOT Boylan), or it was Matt the Mutt humping all and sundry, all the Boylan dogs just seemed craaaaazy.
The most lost and heartfelt prose is dedicated to Penny (aka Sausage), Boylan’s very own Dalmatian whom she left behind and forgot about cuz she was getting older, individuating, and did NOT want her identity to have ANYthing to do with a fat neurotic dog. For Sausage she carries feelings of guilt and sorrow over lost love. The most tender writing goes for a good friend’s dog, Alex, whom Boylan cared for. Now THAT dog, probably cuz he wasn’t raised by the earnest yet clueless Boylans, was all that a dog should be: Companion, Loyal to the very end. When Alex is put to sleep, his ashes are scattered in a very moving ceremony between Boylan and friend, complete with a Ghost Dog showing up and showing them friendliness when they’re feeling somewhat sad and bewildered.
But mostly, the book is straight autobiography even more than memoir, all the life that was lived surrounding her first two memoirs. There’s childhood, a confused adolescence, an even MORE confused life as a man who just does NOT know how relationships work; all he knows is that he feels like a fraud to women he cares deeply about but whom he can’t show his true self to. Once he’s married and a father, he worries about those packages that come to his house, the dresses and high heels that She takes Her first tottering steps toward freedom in. And other than a few years upon initially coming out as Trans when she was a hottie, she spends quite a bit of time harping on the fact that here, after so much time, so very many years, she’s just another aging woman (Something Sis commiserates with).
There are good friends who stayed with Boylan upon her coming out as a woman, and there are the lost friendships that just couldn’t withstand the change. Most touchingly is Boylan sitting down on the sofa with her mother, so afraid that she’ll lose that all-important mother love, but finding a wholehearted embrace instead.
This is greeeeeatly at odds with her own response to her son coming out as a woman many years later. Which was aggravating (Can’t she see how DEVastating rejection is? Doesn’t she know it firsthand already!?). But I felt only a certain smug joy when her other son is so blasé about it all, coming up with a Huh? Yeh, I’ve seen my sister, so?
Kelsey Navarro narrates this all very well, and had I not heard Boylan herself in the Foreword, I’d really have thought Navarro was Boylan. She appears to know the material backward and forward, and she inserts just the right pauses, has just the perfect timing, that the entirety of the audiobook wound up being witty and charming.
Happily ever afters, even if a person getting up there in years and having creaking and groaning joints ain’t all that pleasant, it was soooo nice to listen to a nice family where all have the best interests of the other in their hearts. Marriage can be tough, and there are no guarantees, but to see a marriage that withstood quite a shock and had to make some serious adaptations, a marriage that had to endure questions from a clueless public and from “well”-meaning friends? And to hear about two happy and well-adjusted kids, one who followed the path and was able to become herself along with having a brother who celebrated his new sister?
Good gosh, if that’s not unutterably sweet, I dunno what is.
Just? Dude, where are the dogs? MORE dogs please! But I s’pose, dogs humping legs can be spoken of only so much?
As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases.