There are new reading recs by yours truly up today on The Shepherd! This list is for all you parents and grandparents and aunts and uncles and caregivers who need to have hard conversations with little ones about pets dying. I was inspired to pitch a list of my own after reading my friend Tove Danovich’s list of books about animals that help us understand ourselves better.

If you haven’t checked it out before, The Shepherd is a really cool website to find books to read! Authors recommend lists of their favorite based on different themes, and you can sort bookshelves based on topics such as “dog books” or “books about death.” Check it out!

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I am thrilled to share I have a new essay published in Off Assignment as part of their Letter to a Stranger series. Read “To the Iditarod Man” here, and also check out my “Behind the Essay” interview for the Off Assignment newsletter as well! Thank you so much to editors Colleen Kinder and Aube Rey Lescure for giving this essay a home.

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I am over the moon to have Good Grief: On Loving Pets, Here and Hereafter featured in The Boston Globe: “In new book, local author explores loving and losing our beloved pets.”

Thank you to Globe reporter Cindy Cantrell for attending my Tewksbury Public Library talk and being inspired to write the story, and to photographer Jonathan Wiggs for taking such an amazing portrait of me, Terrence, and Seymour!

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I can’t believe it has been a month. It both flew by and also felt like the longest month of my life. More below on everything that has happened since 8/2! But thank you to everyone who preordered the book, purchased the book once it was out, showed up at an event either virtually or in-person, posted about Good Grief on social media, texted my mom when they heard me on NPR, snapped a photo when they spotted Good Grief  “in the wild” (please NEVER STOP sending me pictures when you see Good Grief in bookstores or libraries, it makes me so happy), and/or sent me an email, DM, text, or other kind of message about how much the book meant to them. All I can say is I have been completely overwhelmed in the best possible way. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

So much has happened since Good Grief came out on 8/2. First, here is a list of all the wonderful interviews, essays, media coverage, reviews, etc. that have come out in the past month. Seriously, it has only been a month???? How????

• Good Grief has been reviewed favorably in Kirkus, Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, Shelf Awareness, The Wellesley News, Booklist, and The Washington Independent Review of Books.
• Good Grief was recommended in reading lists from Book Riot, Literary Hub, Wellesley Magazine, and the New Castle Public Library, plus veterinarian Karen Fine includes Good Grief in the list of pet loss resources on her website.
• You can read an excerpt of Good Grief on Literary Hub!
• The 8/2 Good Grief launch event got a shout-out in the Boston Globe!
• I got to speak about Good Grief on several different podcasts including Library Love Fest (in conversation with Ivy Givens), Writer’s Bone (in conversation with Daniel Ford and Kelly J. Ford, who are not related), Debut Spotlight (in conversation with Rachel Barenbaum), and Dog Talk (in conversation with Tracie Hotchner a.k.a. the Radio Pet Lady).
• My essay “The Heart of a Professor” (about the way one of my college professors showed me great empathy when I had to euthanize my childhood dog Gus)as the Endnotes essay in the summer 2022 issue of Wellesley Magazine.
• Good Grief got a write-up in my hometown local newspaper, The Lexington Minuteman!
• “Ashes to Ashes, Pet to Plant” is my essay for Slate’s Future Tense series about the new industry of pet composting. Thanks to editor Jaime Green for her wise feedback on that piece!
• I was interviewed by the great biologist Marc Bekoff for Psychology Today!
• I also did an interview for AKC.org! Thanks to journalist Ranny Green for taking the time to speak with me for it.
• My essay about #MassAveLola ran on Cognoscenti. Thank you to editor Sara Shukla for giving Lola a home on WBUR!
• I also had an essay about learning to love and let go when it comes to pet pigeons run on Salon!
• The legendary Chewy.com featured Good Grief on their blog Be.Chewy. Thanks to journalist Alyssa Sparacino for writing the piece, and to Lindsey Bluher for getting it set up in the first place, which is full of really helpful concrete tips if you are going through pet loss. It’s a great resource!
• Nicole Graev Lipson took the time to talk to me about Good Grief for the Chicago Review of Books! Thank you, Nicole!
• The Noble & Greenough School, my high school alma mater and former employer, featured Good Grief in the summer issue of their alumni magazine, complete with gorgeous illustrations by John Jay Cabuay.
• The tables turned and Fiction Advocate editor Brian Hurley interviewed me for the August installment of Non-Fiction by Non-Men!
• And Good Grief was featured on NPR’s Here & Now! I got to go into the WBUR studios for my interview with Peter O’Dowd (see above). It was like doing college radio on steroids. My years of WZLY prepared me for this!!!!

In the past month, I did eleven Good Grief events: nine were in person, two were virtual, five were in Massachusetts, one was in New Hampshire, and three were in California. They were hosted by six different indie bookstores (Porter Square Books, Once Upon A Time Bookstore, Toadstool Bookshop, Newtonville Books, Tatnuck Bookseller, and An Unlikely Story), one library (Tewksbury Public), two organizations (The Order of the Good Death and the Wellesley College Club of Los Angeles), one book club (People Who Read Darkness!), and one oddities shop (Memento Mori Los Angeles). I got to be in conversation with Kelly J. Ford, Cat Warren, Sy Montgomery, Chloe Shaw, and Karen Fine. I got to see SO many people I love who came out to support me — far too many to name here, though special shout-outs go to Rachel Barenbaum (for the beautiful introduction at my launch), Erin Greene (who traveled up from NYC to be there on 8/2), Lee Ung (for attending every single one of my West Coast events), Karen and Rich Bartels (for attending almost every single one of my East Coast events, and, in their defense, they would have been at every one but I told them to skip 8/24 because they were tired), and the great Richie Corrado (for his toast at my launch that made everyone cry). If you missed any of these events and are bummed about it, don’t worry! There are recordings of several of them:

• Click here to watch the recording of my 8/2 launch at GrubStreet / Porter Square Books: Boston Edition, in conversation with Kelly J. Ford.
• Click here to watch the recording of my 8/17 virtual event with the Tewksbury Public Library, in conversation Chloe Shaw.
• Click here to watch the recording of my 8/24 event at An Unlikely Story in Plainville, MA.
• Plus a recording of my 8/3 conversation with Cat Warren is available to members of The Order of the Good Death, so become a member today to watch!

But don’t worry!!! I am totally exhausted but that doesn’t mean I don’t have MORE great things planned for September, October, and beyond! Below is a list of all my upcoming events, and be sure to keep checking the events page on my website for the most up-to-date into. (I promise the page will load now! I know there was a bug before, sorry!) All of the below events are in-person unless they are labeled ***VIRTUAL***.

SEPTEMBER:

• TOMORROW!!!!!! Saturday 9/3, 3:00pm EDT: Homecoming event at the Fishers Island Library on Fishers Island, NY!
• Wednesday 9/7, 7:00pm EDT: I get to be in conversation with Kelly J. Ford for the launch of her second novel Real Bad Things at Harvard Book Store in Cambridge, MA!
• Tuesday 9/13, 6:30pm EDT: Author event at Gibson’s in Concord, NH! (Thank you to Sue Smith for setting that one up!)
• Thursday 9/15, 5:00pm EDT: Local Author Book Fair at new indie bookstore Hummingbird Books in Chestnut Hill, MA!
• Sunday 9/18, 4:00pm EDT: ***VIRTUAL*** author talk with the Perfect Paws Pet Ministry!
• Tuesday 9/20, 7:00pm EDT: Author event at Water Street Bookstore in Exeter, NH! (Thank you to Sue Smith for setting that one up!)
• Wednesday 9/21, 7:00pm EDT: Atomic Anna x Good Grief event at Belmont Books in Belmont, MA, where I’ll be in conversation with Rachel Barenbaum!
• Monday 9/26, 7:00pm EDT: ***VIRTUAL*** event with Morbid Anatomy, in conversation with Annie Hartnett! Click here to register.
• Wednesday 9/28, 8:00am EDT: Presentation in assembly at the Noble & Greenough School, followed by a guided tour of the Pine Ridge Pet Cemetery!
• Thursday 9/29, 7:00pm EDT: Part of the Books and Buzz series at Brewster Book Store on the Cape (fundraiser for the Animal Rescue League of Boston)!

OCTOBER:

• Tuesday 10/4, 7:00pm EDT: I get to be in conversation with Rita Zoey Chin for the launch of her debut novel The Strange Inheritance of Leah Fern at Wellesley Books in Wellesley, MA!
• Thursday 10/6, 12:30pm EDT: Visit to professor Christine Carpenter‘s class “The Power of Pets” at Plymouth State University in New Hampshire!
• Thursday 10/20, 8:00pm EDT: “Burgers & Books” party at Tasty Burger in Harvard Square celebrating four GrubStreet authors with 2022 books: Neema Avashia, Rachel Barenbaum, Kelly J. Ford, and me!
• Thursday 10/27, 6:00pm EDT: I’m honored to share that I’ve been chosen to be the Roslindale Book Ambassador for September + October 2022! On this Thursday, I will have a “Conversation with the Author” event from 6:00pm-7:00pm, followed by a book signing from 7:00pm-7:30pm, at the Roslindale Branch of the Boston Public Library.
• Sunday 10/30, 1:00pm EDT: Session on “Writing Collections: Short Stories and Essays” with Thomas McNeely as part of the Concord Festival of Authors, at the Concord Free Public Library.

NOVEMBER:

• Thursday 11/3, 7:00pm EDT: Book event in New York City at McNally Jackson’s Seaport location (4 Fulton Street)! I will be in conversation with the artist Heide Hatry, and a reception will follow at McNally Jackson Seaport’s new snazzy cocktail bar!

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On January 30, I sold my book Good Grief: On Loving Pets, Here and Hereafter, to Houghton Mifflin Harcourt! My editor is the wonderful Naomi Gibbs, known for editing many incredible books, including some of my favorites from the past couple years: Friday Black by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, How to Write an Autobiographical Novel: Essays by Alexander Chee, Tango Lessons: A Memoir by Meghan Flaherty, and After the Eclipse: A Mother’s Murder, a Daughter’s Search by Sarah Perry. A publication date is not set yet (likely sometime in 2021) but the one thing I know for certain now is I have to turn in a complete draft of the book by the end of January 2020. HERE WE GO!

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In case you missed it, I now share my home with a celebrity. Terrence the tortoise (a.k.a. @theofficialmrt) was featured in the summer 2018 issue of Wellesley Magazine, in a piece called “The Heart of a Pet” by Lisa Scanlon Mogolov. The fame is really going to his head, and he is becoming insufferable to deal with. But it’s okay, I still love him. I mean, just look at that cute illustration by Miranda Sofroniou! What a guy.

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As you may know, I’ve become a bit of a regular reader at the Mortified show at Oberon, thanks to the best-ever Mortified producer, Sara Faith Alterman. But now I’m super excited to share that you don’t have to be in the Cambridge area to hear me read my most embarrassing childhood journal entries!

Check out the most recent episode of the Mortified Podcast (89: An Ode to Childhood Pets), to hear about my past pet tortoise Aristotle and my current book project. I’m honored to be featured with such hilarious individuals––and it’s comforting to know I wasn’t the only kid who felt closer to animals than people, or who tried to incorporate pets into every possible school project. Thanks to Neil Katcher for interviewing me and including me in the podcast.

Listen here or download on iTunes.

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—

In fourth grade, I was the new student in school. While I liked many of my classmates, I felt shy when it came to having people over to my house or accepting birthday party invitations. Only by the very end of the year had I begun to feel like I made a couple friends, including a sweet, quiet, freckly girl named Meredith, whom everyone called Meri. Meri and I became friends after a hypothetical question about our dream pets posed to the class by our teacher: we both said we would like to have a ferret. We bonded further when we realized we both drool a lot in our sleep. While neither Meri nor I ever got a ferret, at the end of fourth grade, Meri adopted an orange and white hamster named Chuckie from another classmate of ours. Chuckie was already a couple years old, which is well past middle age for a hamster, plus he had a hard life before he arrived in Meri’s warm, caring arms. Our classmate’s older brother liked to jump over the squirmy, scrawny fistful of fur with his skateboard. When our classmate decided that perhaps Chuckie would be happier living in a household without such traumas – a rodent heart attack couldn’t be far off if the skate tricks kept up – Meri took him in. Already strongly maternal at nine, Meri showered Chuckie with affection, and in no time at all, he had fattened up and calmed down: a fuzzy sphere with tiny, white hand-claws, shiny black eyes, thin brown ears. His favorite activity was rolling around on the floor inside a transparent blue ball.

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—

Looking around the New England Reptile Expo, I decided I wasn’t one of these people.

Older men examined crickets, kids clutched Tupperwares of geckos, but the crowd seemed mostly twenty-to-forty-year-olds trapped in a mall-Goth-teenager phase. Baggy black pants. Dark dyed hair. Clothing from Hot Topic. Tattoos of reptiles. Live snakes around arms. Piercings. Lizards on shoulders. Pasty skin. Glazed eyes.

“I bet most of these people listen to Marilyn Manson,” my boyfriend, Richie, whispered.

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Yes. This book.

I have been forced, because the Babysitting Charge demands it, to read the book Harriet the Hamster Fairy out loud, every afternoon, while the Charge eats her snack, for the better part of a week, and let me just say, Harriet, it’s time to get your shit together.

This hamster fairy book – I mean, first let’s just pause and think about that phrase, hamster fairy – is part of a series called, appropriately, Pet Fairies. The concept is that in the fairy world, owners don’t choose their pets, the pets choose their owners, and so each fairy in the series – there are seven, which is way too many in my opinion – has been magically chosen by a special animal. So everyone in the fairyland has an animal except poor mean old Jack Frost. All he wants is a pet of his own, but the fairy pets are snobs and only want to be owned by fairies, and so instead of resigning to a pet-less existence and getting really into pruning bonsai trees, he kidnaps – sorry, petnaps – all of the animals. But, luckily, the pets escape into the human world and protagonist Kirsty Tate and her BFF Rachel Walker must help the pet fairies rescue their pets before Jack Frost has his nasty old green goblins get to the fairy pets first. Got it? It’s ok, I don’t get it either. I mean, why does Jack Frost have goblins? Is that a thing? Also, isn’t being a fairy hard enough without having to worry about taking care a pet? I mean, come on, one of the pet fairies has a pet horse. Don’t fairies fly? Why would she need to ride a horse? Let alone the fact that I can’t wrap my head around the fairy vs. human world space/time dimensions, but that seems more of a problem for an astro-physicist than for me, your local babysitter.

So, here we are, the Charge eating peanut butter off a spoon, and me reading Harriet the Hamster Fairy and wondering who the hell writes this stuff. The author of this series is named Daisy Meadows, which is the pen name for a series of ghostwriters who I can only assume are too ashamed to have their real names associated with the Pet Fairies series. But couldn’t they have picked a better name? Daisy Meadows sounds like someone was raised on a commune in California or moonlights as a stripper. Also, a note to the publisher: are you really using Curlz MT for all the chapter titles? Isn’t it 2014? Shouldn’t we have moved on by now?

Curlz MT? I didn’t know it was still 1997.

Diving into the plot: it’s weak. The action takes place all in one busy morning, when Kirsty and Rachel go over to their buddy Jamie’s house to feed his pet hamster, Nibbles, while Jamie is out of town on some boring mandatory family vacation. Naturally, when they arrive, the hamster cage is open, Nibbles is nowhere to be found, and they must go on a mission to locate him. They encounter some of Jack Frost’s goblins along the way and find out they – those assholes – let Nibbles loose to lure the fairy hamster to rescue him, and, lo and behold, the fairy hamster shows up and like an idiot she gets captured by the goblins, and then Harriet shows up and is all like come on what the hell give me back my hamster, but, of course, spoiler alert, Kirsty and Rachel find the fairy hamster and get her back to Harriet no problem and then also find Nibbles because what’s easier than finding one hamster but finding two. Yeah, how many times does that happen in real life? What usually happens to hamsters when they escape? They get eaten by the cat or trapped inside a pipe in a wall or vacuumed up by an unsuspecting but well-meaning parent. As soon as Kirsty and Rachael saw that the cage door was open, they should have assumed Nibbles was Dead with a capital D and written off their friendship with Jamie and headed over to the mall to buy earrings at Claire’s for some retail therapy.

That hamster is D-E-A-D dead.

And while we are on the subject of unrealistic expectations, let’s talk about the climax of the book. This is how Kirsty and Rachel finally rescue the fairy hamster: they tickle the goblin’s feet until he can’t handle it anymore and he asks them, politely of course, to stop please, and he will give back the hamster. Yes. Tickling. Ok, sure, manners are important and I guess it’s good that there is no violence in this book or whatever, but, kid, if a goblin captures your pet hamster in real life, you are going to have to smash that guy on the head to get back your little rodent. If the goblin hasn’t already eaten said hamster. See: Dead with a capital D.

Last, let’s take a look at the author’s use of language. Did you know there are many synonyms out there for the word “grin”? I guess this writer did not, because Kirsty and Rachel and Harriet grin at everything – at each other, at the hamster, at the goblins which is totally insane because they should be frowning angrily at the goblins because the goblins are being jerks running around trying to steal hamsters, but no, everyone is always doing everything with a grin or grinning excitedly or winking and grinning at the same time. If I did a shot for every time I had to read the word grin out loud, I would be in late stage liver failure and the book is only sixty-seven pages long. Why can’t anyone smile or smirk or beam? And don’t get me started on how much they giggle. Why can’t anyone laugh or chuckle or cackle? Everyone is giggling all the damn time in this book. Be more creative, people/fairies/hamsters/goblins.

GRINNING ALL THE TIME.

In the end, I give Harriet the Hamster Fairy one out of five stars because, at least you can make the goblins sound like angry New York cab drivers when reading out loud, and the end of the book leaves the reader with a strong message that one should always clean up any mess that has been made in the living room, even if you, Rachel and Kirsty, didn’t do it and it was all the dumb hamster fairy’s fault that there are wood chip shavings and sunflower seeds all over the place. So enough talk, kids, and go clean up your messes.

Let’s hope Molly the Goldfish Fairy is a step up.

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