The dog is man's best friend. For Mark Doty, his two dogs were a salvation and the inspiration for his recent memoir.

BY CHRISTOPHER LISOTTA

Picked by Amazon.com as one of the ten best gay books of 2007, Mark Doty's Dog Years: A Memoir recounts his relationship with his dogs, who were instrumental in helping him deal with his partner's battle with AIDS. The book hit a nerve with readers dealing with grief and dog lovers who have always wondered what their canine companions were thinking. A prolific writer, Doty has a collection of poetry coming out this spring.

FRONTIERS: How did you come up with the idea of the book?

MARK DOTY: I spent 16 years living with two wonderful big retrievers. After losing the second one, I felt such a sense of absence in my life where that very animated, vital creature had been. It was perhaps a year or so later that I found myself really wanting to write about the role that animals play in our lives, and the way that we choose to live with creatures who never speak our language, who will not live as long as we do, yet millions and millions of people sign on to that bond. And I just wanted to think about that-what is it that we get from being in relation to animals in that way?

People say your book is a smarter, gay Marley & Me. Were you surprised by the reaction to the book?

The thing that struck me most was how many people seem to feel validated by the depth of feeling in the book. All of us, so many people who love animals, go through real experiences of mourning and grief when we lose them. That grief is not exactly socially acceptable. People feel you are supposed to keep that to yourself, you're supposed to reserve your emotions for other people, and that it is sentimental or somehow trivial to grieve for your pet…

...and I guess people say just get another pet.

Exactly. I got that from some interviewers about the book. Well, we don't say that about people—well, get yourself another lover, find yourself another friend! It is true that our relationships with animals are almost always shorter. They are of a different character than our relationships with other people. But at the same time they are very intimate and very profound for us. I have gotten so much mail from people who thanked me for giving them permission to feel what they did.

You wrote from the perspective of the dogs. Was that a scary proposition?

It was scary on several levels. On the one hand I felt there was a real danger of writing a very drippy, sentimental book. What could be worse than somebody talking about their pets for 300 pages? I was afraid of being boring or self indulgent. At the same time I was afraid of presuming too much, because we can't ever really know quite how it feels to be a dog. I had to admit that to the degree I could.

Do you think you had a unique take on grief since you had a partner who died of AIDS?

I don't think it is so unique. The truth is we all at some point or another in our lives lose what we love. I think I am lucky to have the ability to talk about it and to describe what that experience is like in a way that is pretty direct. I lost my partner at a younger age, and most people experience the death of somebody they love, and that was a real characteristic of the AIDS epidemic. The people that we loved died earlier in their lives, so the kinds of losses you might expect to experience in say, your 60s and 70s were for many of us part of our 30s and 40s.

When you say you're a poet, do people just look at you?

That is something I never want to say to people on an airplane. The person sitting next to me says “What do you do? I'm a writer. What do you write? Poetry.” That's the end of that conversation almost always. The truth is there is a very devoted band of readers of poetry in this country now, and I think the art is in better shape than it's been at any other time in my lifetime in terms of the size of the audience and the interest of the audience. It's not a mass art, not in this country, and that's alright.

Would you ever own a cat?

I have had cats. I had two cats who I was very fond of, and they are sort of quite peripheral figures in dog years since I didn't think it was their story. I couldn't write the dog and cat years simultaneously. I don't think I would ever write a book about a cat because the relationship is another kind of thing that doesn't compel my imagination in the same way. But cats are great.