Flatiron Books Q&A: Chloe Shaw, Origins of WHAT IS A DOG?
Editor’s Note: Chloe Shaw grew up in Brooklyn Heights as Chloe Bland. Her first book,What Is a Dog?, debuted in July and has received widespread critical acclaim. She will be interviewed on a live Zoom program with Greenlight Bookstore in Brooklyn in August. She worked as a longtime assistant to novelist John Irving before turning her own literary efforts to what seems a primeval, dear and enduring relationship between dogs and humans.
Q: In your poetic, meditative, and absorbing debut memoir WHAT IS A DOG?, you return to the canines of your past and present in order to imagine the human you hope to become in the future. How did the idea for this book originate?
As I started to come to terms with the fact that our beloved dog, Booker (age 15), was ailing and would, not too far into the future, die, I started a website called Bye, Beast (no longer active) in honor of him. Animal loss is such tricky grief. It’s just a dog. All grief is lonely, and like all grief, grief over an animal is lonely in its own way. It can feel childish and embarrassing, like we’re not supposed to talk about it. We’re just supposed to get over it and get another dog. At Bye, Beast, people were welcome to submit remembrances of animals loved and lost in a safe space that they could share with the world. But when Booker finally died in June of 2015, I couldn’t begin to write about him. It was all too big and booming. It would take the next couple of years for me to process what that dog’s life and death had done to—and for—me. In the winter of 2018, I was finally able to sit still and write about him, an exercise that brought me back to the dogs of my childhood, what they each represented at different times of my life, and encouraged me to consider more broadly what a dog is anyway.