WHILE, LIKE MOST WRITERS, I use elements from my own life to create a sense of reality in my fiction, most of the characters and events in I Thought You Were Dead were created out of whole cloth. There was, however, a real Stella, and she was not so different from the Stella in the book, half yellow Labrador and half German shepherd.
I’d gone to graduate school at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop and worked at a bar whose owner, also the president of the BMW Motorcycle Owners of America club, lived on a farm he’d converted into a campground for bikers making cross-country journeys. On the campground, he had an outdoor volleyball court with lights. On hot, humid Iowa summer nights, some of us would go there to play volleyball, and often we men would take off our shirts. Stella was one of a loose pack of nameless farm hounds who lived in the weeds beyond the lights, and often as not, one of them would sneak in and steal a sweaty T-shirt, and then they would all rip it to shreds. Stella was always the friendliest pup of the bunch and the first to come forward to say hello. When it was time for me to leave Iowa, I wanted a companion, and so, with the owner’s permission, I drove out to the farm, picked her up, threw her into the cab of my pickup truck, and off we went, headed west. I eventually stopped in Portland, Oregon. Stella was so disconsolate, having left her littermates behind, that she pouted all the way to Montana and barely lifted her head from her paws.
I named the dog Stella at the recommendation of a friend who said, “That way, when you call her, you can pretend you’re Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire.” The friend’s name was Olivia Wendell Holmes, so I figured she knew a thing or two about names.
One of the reasons I left Iowa was a romantic breakup. Stella helped me recover from the heartache, sleeping on the bed with me, keeping me company, and forcing me to exercise when I walked her every night. I read a book on dog training called The Koehler Method and made myself something of an expert on the subject, to the point where I could walk Stella off leash and maintain vocal control over her, which was easy because all she wanted was to get along with everybody. “Never met a man she didn’t lick,” I used to joke.
I moved from Portland, Oregon, to Providence, Rhode Island, where I roomed with a friend who had two dogs, and I dated a woman named Rosemary who had a miniature poodle named Tumbler. Sometimes I’d walk all four dogs to a nearby high school field to run. I never had to put leashes on any of them. My practice was to walk them around the corner, make them wait until I checked the street for traffic, and if it was safe to cross, I’d say, “Okay — go!” and all four dogs would run at full speed across the street and through a V-shaped opening in the cyclone fence surrounding the field. One night, around dusk, I walked the dogs, made them wait, then gave the command, “Okay — go!” but I failed to notice in the darkness that some time during the day, the city had fixed the hole in the fence. All four dogs ran at full speed, face-first, smack, into the fence, then looked at me as if I’d intentionally played a cruel joke on them. They were all fine, but it was a while before they trusted me again. They also may have been mad at me for laughing at them, but it was, frankly, hilarious.
I moved from Providence to Northampton, Massachusetts, where I lived in an apartment on Main Street and then moved to another place that was much like the one I describe in I Thought You Were Dead. I wrote books and freelanced for magazines, including National Wildlife, which was where I got the idea for a book-within- a- book called Nature for Morons. I married, and Stella was our flower girl, and then I got divorced, and my wife moved out, and it was just Stella and me again. I talked to her, and I suppose much of what the dog in the book says is what I imagined my Stella would have said to me if she could. It struck me then as remarkable — and it still does — the way dogs know when a human companion is upset, the way they come to you, out of some sort of pack instinct, and it feels very much like they’re trying to help.
Toward the end of her life, Stella became more and more afraid of thunderstorms. One summer day, I’d left Stella at home (she was usually with me 24-7 but not this time), and I was working in my office downtown when, around suppertime, a massive storm rolled in. I rushed home, because I knew Stella would have a hard time of it. I’d come home once during a prior thunderstorm and found her standing in the bathtub, shaking. When I got home this time, I couldn’t find her. I looked in the tub, behind the bed, in the closet, all over the apartment, calling her name, wondering where she could possibly be hiding, until I noticed that in her terror, she’d gotten up on the couch and actually pushed through the screen window to get out, jumping down onto the front porch. I drove around town for over an hour looking for her, to no avail. I was, needless to say, concerned. Around 11:30 that night, my phone rang. Stella wore a tag on her collar with my phone number on it as well as a message that said, if you find me outside a bar, leave me alone — my owner is inside. Thankfully, the caller ignored that message.
“I found your dog,” he said. “She’s downtown, outside Jake’s.”
A breakfast haunt of mine.
I drove downtown and parked in front of the restaurant. Stella had her back to me, and she was woofing tentatively and tilting her head from side to side, barking at the darkened eating establishment, a place she recognized. She looked, in fact, exactly like the image that appeared on the dust jacket for the hardcover edition of this novel. I tiptoed up behind her, crouched down, and tapped her on the shoulder, saying, “Hi, Stella.” The title of the book, I Thought You Were Dead, comes from the greeting she gave me that night.
At the end, I realized that she’d been with me for what were easily the most formative sixteen-plus years of my life, a time when I’d grown, and grown up, in so many ways. She’d been at my side every step of the way, witness to all of it. The day I put her down was one of the hardest days of my life, and as in the book, my ex-wife joined me to help me through it. The day I wrote that scene was no picnic either. A writing teacher in graduate school once advised me, “Never write about something unless you care passionately about it.” When I started writing and outlining I Thought You Were Dead, I made a list of all the things I cared passionately about, all the things I loved or wanted the most, and all the things I feared the most, and I resolved to try to put them all in my book. Stella was at the top of the list of the things I cared about.
She was there in the first draft, and through countless subsequent drafts, she loomed larger and larger, until by the end of the editing process, she was clearly the second most important character and arguably the most likable. I had no specific plan for her other than to give her a human voice and allow her to say the things I could imagine her saying in “real life,” though a large part of the character was also based on my maternal grandmother, who lived two doors down from us and who was also wise and funny and endlessly patient and forgiving.
It’s been my experience that memory is fallible, and my memory is not much better than anyone else’s and is often worse, but when I bear down to write, I can summon distant memories with an accuracy that surprises me. Writing is, for me, a physical act of memory. In that way, it was not hard to relive the life I’d had with Stella and do her justice, I hope, by committing my memories of her to paper. I intended, from the beginning, to write a book that was more than just “another one of those dog books.” I wanted to write about a man whose heart is torn and pulled at in every direction, someone who tries to identify and face down his demons and overcome his bad habits, with some help along the way. Much of that help comes from Stella, who forces Paul to be honest and holds him to account. I think real dogs can do the same thing, force us to be honest, simply because if it’s stupid to talk to them, it’s even stupider to lie to them. The truth is that although real dogs may not talk, they always listen, and they look you in the eye when they do. They attend.
When I went on tour to promote I Thought You Were Dead, I brought a small vial of Stella’s ashes with me to return them to the farm in Iowa where I found her. It seemed appropriate. However, when I got to Iowa, I learned that the man who had owned the bar I worked at had retired and sold his farm to a developer, and now, instead of a farm, there was a gigantic shopping mall at the location. I could have taken Stella’s ashes and sprinkled them in the potted ferns outside Banana Republic, but that didn’t seem right, so I put them back in my pocket. In truth, I like having a small piece of her still with me, just as I am glad to share a part of her with my readers.