A Small Dog Saved My Life

Оглавление

Bel Mooney. A Small Dog Saved My Life

Bel Mooney. A Small Dog Saved My Life. A Story of Survival

Contents

INTRODUCTION

One. FINDING

Two. LOSING

Three. MOVING

Four. REBUILDING

Five. GROWING

Six. UNDERSTANDING

Seven. SEEKING

EPILOGUE

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

About the Author

Praise

Credits

Copyright

About the Publisher

Отрывок из книги

For Gaynor and Ernie

(and Bertie too)

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As Malcolm and I walked to the restaurant she had recommended for lunch, I delivered myself – solemnly and with a certain degree of patronizing pity – of the opinion that those ‘teacup’ Yorkies were surrogate children for Amy Tan and her husband, Louis. Oh, statement of the obvious! What did I know? In the same way, years before when we were young, I had found some pathos in the fact that J’s elderly aunts, who lived together, posted birthday cards to each other signed from their toy poodles, Lavinia and Amanda-Jane. Later I would shake my head in disbelief on reading, in a magazine profile, that the novelist Jilly Cooper kept a picture of her dead mongrel in a locket. I was smug in my refusal to acknowledge true value in that level of affection for an animal. How fitting it was that hubris would arrive on my horizon shaped as a small dog.

Malcolm was to tease me a few weeks later, when he was editing out those yaps and one or two small dog breaths for the finished programme, and I had already fallen in love with Bonnie. He laughed that the day in San Francisco had turned me into an aspirational copycat who realized that real literary ladies must have dogs. I huffed and puffed at the joke against myself – still resisting the notion that I could be perceived as one of those women with a handbag dog.

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