Books |
Dreaming in Libro: How A Good Dog Tamed A Bad Woman
Louise Bernikow
By
Published: May 20, 2009
Category:
Memoir
I am not a “dog person”. True, I was seen with one for several years in my last marriage because my beloved stepson, who never asked for anything, uttered the fatal words, “I don’t want a dog, I need a dog.” This time around, our daughter is on notice. No pets. Ever. Unhappy? Save it for the shrink.
Louise Bernikow was, when I was hanging out with her some decades ago, very much not a “dog person”. A noted journalist and feminist historian, she was the fiercest woman I knew in New York: annoyingly smart, achingly attractive, a bachelorette to the death.
And that wasn’t just my take.
Louise Bernikow would be the first to tell you that she has done her share of dancing on tables. She has kissed a date good night — and raced out for a nightcap with his brother. And in the days when she owned a car, she writes, “I carried a nightgown, birth control and my passport in the trunk… ready to leave for Paris at a moment’s notice.”
But as she was jogging in Riverside Park one spring afternoon, she spotted a crowd. In its center, a police car. And, in the back seat, the cause of the fuss: a purebred boxed with a stumpy tail and “those eyes”.
Inexplicably, she took him home.
Louise and Libro’s “getting to know you” period is described in her first “dog” book, [LINK] Bark If You Know Me. I did not read it for the simple fact that I could not believe Louise wrote it. Friends told me how charming it was, how well written, how very Louise; nothing would lure me.
Now Louise Bernikow has a second “dog” memoir. Again, friends banged on about it. This time, the combination of an appealing subtitle and personal nostalgia got me to peek inside. Great first sentence: “My mother always told me I would grow into my feet and my nose.” And the “how we met” story wasn’t bad. Before I knew it, I was reading — and I was appalled.
Here is Louise, padding around on all fours beside her dog (”partly for knowledge of his spatial perspective”).
Here is Louise, babbling to her dog “like an infatuated nincompoop.”
Here is Louise, once capable of leaving her apartment and not coming home for days, now rushing home at Swiss-watch intervals and climbing four flights of stairs to feed and walk her dog.
As I say, appalling.
But also, here is Louise jabbing me in the eye with perceptions that dog owners have never shared with me. “Perhaps what animal lovers really love is access to their own tenderness,” she writes. And: “Just because a man is nice to his dog doesn’t mean he is a nice man.”
As I kept reading, the ratio of treacle to smart changed. Smart won, paw’s down. Because although it seemed like madness for Louise to treat Libro as if he were human, Libro was clearly an advanced being — Louie’s personal guru, as it turns out.
There are wonderful chapters here: Louise’s book tour in California, Libro in tow, is a hoot, and lucky are those who showed up at bookstores to catch their double act. And there is something charming about a woman who relaxes her search for love with a man because she’s already found it with a dog.
One argument about pets is that you are likely to survive them — and then you have to deal with the grief. Not so fast, in this case. Louise gets cancer, and this time, it’s the dog who/that has to adjust. And then, later…..
‘‘Dreaming in Libro’ is, for most of its breezy, 202 pages, an unleashed romp in the park. Dog lovers who read it will be nodding like bobbleheads. Cat lovers will be jealous as…oh…cats.
