Marley & Me: Life and Love with the World's Worst Dog by John Grogan

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Marley: 100 pounds of unbridled canine exuberance and unrelenting mischief. Marley: proud owner of a tail that could, with metronome-like regularity, clear coffee tables and topple unsuspecting toddlers. Marley: noble member of a breed famous for its ability to guide the blind, who's declared "untrainable" and bounced out of obedience class. A perfect dog? Maybe not. But when they plucked him from a litter 13 years ago, John Grogan and his new wife gamely set out on an adventure that would change their lives forever.

As a puppy, this whirling dervish with huge golden paws and an enormous head jumps, chews, careens, and goes nuclear at the first rumble of thunder. With his uncontainable energy, Marley isn't exactly the calm, attentive, obedient Lab the Grogans had hoped for. As the years pass and the family grows, Marley teaches his owners hard lessons in patience. His neurotic behavior, though mellowed over time, becomes a lasting and finally acceptable characteristic, and his loyalty and love enrich the Grogans' own notions of friendship and responsibility.

Joyfully infectious, Marley & Me is a loving valentine to one dog and his unquenchable spirit. John Grogan has captured their journey together, and in this delightfully moving story, has set the bar high for dog owners everywhere. (Holiday 2005 Selection)

From the Publisher

John and Jenny were just beginning their life together. They were young and in love, with a perfect little house and not a care in the world. Then they brought home Marley, a wriggly yellow furball of a puppy. Life would never be the same.

Marley quickly grew into a barreling, ninety-seven-pound streamroller of a Labrador retriever. He crashed through screen doors, gouged through drywall, and stole women's undergarments. Obedience school did no good — Marley was expelled.

And yet his heart was pure. Just as Marley joyfully refused any limits on his behavior, his love and loyalty were boundless, too. A dog like no other, Marley remained steadfast, a model of devotion, even when his family was at its wit's end. Unconditional love, they would learn, comes in many forms.

The New York Times - Janet Maslin

Mr. Grogan knew the workings of Marley's mind. He makes that abundantly clear in Marley and Me, a very funny valentine to all those four-legged "big, dopey, playful galumphs that seemed to love life with a passion not often seen in this world." It's a book with intense but narrow appeal, strictly limited to anyone who has ever had, known or wanted a dog.

Publishers Weekly

Labrador retrievers are generally considered even-tempered, calm and reliable-and then there's Marley, the subject of this delightful tribute to one Lab who doesn't fit the mold. Grogan, a columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer, and his wife, Jenny, were newly married and living in West Palm Beach when they decided that owning a dog would give them a foretaste of the parenthood they anticipated. Marley was a sweet, affectionate puppy who grew into a lovably naughty, hyperactive dog. With a light touch, the author details how Marley was kicked out of obedience school after humiliating his instructor (whom Grogan calls Miss Dominatrix) and swallowed an 18-karat solid gold necklace (Grogan describes his gross but hilarious "recovery operation"). With the arrival of children in the family, Marley became so incorrigible that Jenny, stressed out by a new baby, ordered her husband to get rid of him; she eventually recovered her equilibrium and relented. Grogan's chronicle of the adventures parents and children (eventually three) enjoyed with the overly energetic but endearing dog is delivered with great humor. Dog lovers will love this account of Grogan's much loved canine. Agent, Laurie Abkemeier. (On sale Oct. 25) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Okay, maybe he chewed things and ran into screen doors, but Marley also taught Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Grogan the meaning of love. Morrow's big hit at BEA. Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Maudlin, embarrassing ode to a pooch. The author and his wife still qualified as newlyweds-they'd been married just over a year-when they decided to adopt a dog. Jenny, who had recently killed a houseplant (a "lovely large dieffenbachia with emerald-and-cream variegated leaves"), thought she needed to brush up on her maternal skills before she tried to have a baby. Hence Marley, a lovable Labrador retriever. John adores the reggae tempo of Marley's tail-wagging and enjoys playing tug-of-war with him. Within a few weeks, the Grogans felt confident about their caretaking ability and tossed their birth control in the trash. Jenny got pregnant, but miscarried; she embraced not only John but also Marley in her grief. And on it went: Marley got kicked out of obedience class. He developed a fear of thunder, which the Grogans discussed seriously with a vet. When the Grogans went on a trip, they left a six-page memo about Marley's care with the colleague who agreed to dog-sit. (Blessedly, the author only reproduces three-and-a-half of those pages here.) Marley appeared in a movie, The Last Home Run. Jenny got pregnant again-maybe it was because Marley sometimes lolled around in bed with the Grogans during their basal-temperature-ovulation-calendar-we-must-have-sex-right-this-second drill-sessions-and ultimately carried two pregnancies to term. But it feels as if Grogan has mistaken Marley for his first baby. He's like those people who prattle on about every single blessed thing their kids do-except in this case, it's a dog. Marley died at age 13, and the book ends with the Grogans thinking of adopting another puppy. Please, no sequels! Only the most alarmingly devoted dog lovers should bother withthis one.

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Table of Contents

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Marley & Me

HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.

Chapter One

And Puppy Makes Three

We were young. We were in love. We were rollicking in those sublime early days of marriage when life seems about as good as life can get. We could not leave well enough alone. And so on a January evening in 1991, my wife of fifteen months and I ate a quick dinner together and headed off to answer a classified ad in the Palm Beach Post.

Why we were doing this, I wasn't quite sure. A few weeks earlier I had awoken just after dawn to find the bed beside me empty. I got up and found Jenny sitting in her bathrobe at the glass table on the screened porch of our little bungalow, bent over the newspaper with a pen in her hand.

There was nothing unusual about the scene. Not only was the Palm Beach Post our local paper, it was also the source of half of our household income. We were a two-newspaper-career couple. Jenny worked as a feature writer in the Post's "Accent" section; I was a news reporter at the competing paper in the area, the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, based an hour south in Fort Lauderdale. We began every morning poring over the newspapers, seeing how our stories were played and how they stacked up to the competition. We circled, underlined, and clipped with abandon.

But on this morning, Jenny's nose was not in the news pages but in the classified section. When I stepped closer, I saw she was feverishly circling beneath the heading "Pets -- Dogs."

"Uh," I said in that new-husband, still-treading-gently voice. "Is there something I should know?"

She did not answer.

"Jen-Jen?"

"It's the plant," she finally said, her voice carrying a slight edge of desperation.

"The plant?" I asked.

"That dumb plant," she said. "The one we killed."

The one we killed? I wasn't about to press the point, but for the record it was the plant that I bought and she killed. I had surprised her with it one night, a lovely large dieffenbachia with emerald-and-cream variegated leaves. "What's the occasion?" she'd asked. But there was none. I'd given it to her for no reason other than to say, "Damn, isn't married life great?"

She had adored both the gesture and the plant and thanked me by throwing her arms around my neck and kissing me on the lips. Then she promptly went on to kill my gift to her with an assassin's coldhearted efficiency. Not that she was trying to; if anything, she nurtured the poor thing to death. Jenny didn't exactly have a green thumb. Working on the assumption that all living things require water, but apparently forgetting that they also need air, she began flooding the dieffenbachia on a daily basis.

"Be careful not to overwater it," I had warned.

"Okay," she had replied, and then dumped on another gallon.

The sicker the plant got, the more she doused it, until finally it just kind of melted into an oozing heap. I looked at its limp skeleton in the pot by the window and thought, Man, someone who believes in omens could have a field day with this one.

Now here she was, somehow making the cosmic leap of logic from dead flora in a pot to living fauna in the pet classifieds. Kill a plant, buy a puppy. Well, of course it made perfect sense.

I looked more closely at the newspaper in front of her and saw that one ad in particular seemed to have caught her fancy. She had drawn three fat red stars beside it. It read: "Lab puppies, yellow. AKC purebred. All shots. Parents on premises."

"So," I said, "can you run this plant-pet thing by me one more time?"

"You know," she said, looking up. "I tried so hard and look what happened. I can't even keep a stupid houseplant alive. I mean, how hard is that? All you need to do is water the damn thing."

Then she got to the real issue: "If I can't even keep a plantalive, how am I ever going to keep a baby alive?" She looked like she might start crying.

The Baby Thing, as I called it, had become a constant in Jenny's life and was getting bigger by the day. When we had first met, at a small newspaper in western Michigan, she was just a few months out of college, and serious adulthood still seemed a far distant concept. For both of us, it was our first professional job out of school. We ate a lot of pizza, drank a lot of beer, and gave exactly zero thought to the possibility of someday being anything other than young, single, unfettered consumers of pizza and beer.

But years passed. We had barely begun dating when various job opportunities -- and a one-year postgraduate program for me -- pulled us in different directions across the eastern United States. At first we were one hour's drive apart. Then we were three hours apart. Then eight, then twenty-four. By the time we both landed together in South Florida and tied the knot, she was nearly thirty. Her friends were having babies. Her body was sending her strange messages. That once seemingly eternal window of procreative opportunity was slowly lowering.

I leaned over her from behind, wrapped my arms around her shoulders, and kissed the top of her head. "It's okay," I said. But I had to admit, she raised a good question. Neither of us had ever really nurtured a thing in our lives. Sure, we'd had pets growing up, but they didn't really count. We always knew our parents would keep them alive and well. We both knew we wanted to one day have children, but was either of us really up for the job? Children were so . . . so . . . scary. They were helpless and fragile and looked like they would break easily if dropped.

Continues...

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