Anna Heyward is the author of Living with Freddie: How a Dog Taught Me to Be Human, out September 8th from Random House. Below, she discusses the significance of dogs in literature. (Photo credit: Anna Heyward)

I often find writing about the significance of dogs in literature to be difficult, because animals in literature are almost always used as a way of talking about the human beings around them.

I get it. Animals are lively and interesting, and, helpfully, they don’t speak for themselves, at least not in ways we tend to understand, so they’re great for providing useful metaphors or embodiments for ideas we want them to carry.

Most writing about animals is actually about how we experience our own observations of animals; what we think their behavior means, or how we might feel if similar things happened to us. It’s really hard to avoid, but it’s also deeply understandable. Our own experience is what we have to try to understand things.

To see animals discussed for the sake of themselves, we usually have to turn to the science books, and if you want to look at the other side of it completely, and think about how animals live their lives and what being alive is like for them, I recommend An Immense World by Ed Yong, in which the author encourages us to think about what happens outside of the narrow range of sensory perception that we possess.

But anyway, back to the genre of writing-about-animals-as-a-way-to-write-about-humans, because it has some great work in it. For instance, My Dog Tulip, the 1956 memoir by J.R. Ackerley in which the author adopts an Alsatian shepherd. The book has a history of being read as a social metaphor: Ackerley was openly gay, which was rare at the time, and suffered from social ostracization and loneliness. In the introduction to one of the editions I own, Elizabeth Marshall Thomas writes that “Popular theory held that Ackerley let his dog act out his antisocial sentiments.”

Ackerley’s profound misunderstanding of Tulip is part of the story, and some of the most moving passages are those in which he realizes how wrong he has been. He calls her his “beautiful animal,” his “Tulip dear.” He has the tendency, as many of us do, to interpret dog behavior as things that relate to him; what else could it be? He thinks she’s waking him up in the night because she’s checking on his well-being (he’s a light sleeper disturbed by bad dreams of the war). In fact, she just needs to go outside to go to the toilet. However incorrect, inconvenient, difficult the relationship between Ackerley and Tulip is, it is ineffable. He is so tortured over the fact that he is disappointing her that he wishes he had never met her.

Another classic in the genre is the novel The Friend by Sigrid Nunez, which isn’t about the titular dog as much as it is about the human concerns of love and grief and relating to other people (I think it’s actually about writing, though). But it’s not a book about animals—except, of course, it sort of is: the human animal.

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