One man and his bestseller: the dog that ate America

It's a cutesy tale of the 13 years that a writer and his wife spent with their lovable Labrador. But instead of being left on the remainder tables, 'Marley & Me' has become a sensational bestseller in the US. Now it's bounding over here. Andrew Buncombe reports

There is something of a jokey adage within American publishing that there are two guaranteed bestsellers - books about pets and books about President Abraham Lincoln. The perfect publishers pitch, so the joke goes, would be a book about Lincoln's dog.

Who knows what would have happened if John Grogan had decided to write a book about Honest Abe, the 16th President of the United States? Instead he wrote a book about his own dog - and in doing so he penned a publishing sensation.

Grogan's memoir, Marley and Me, may not be remarkable literature but it has been a remarkable success. The gentle story of his late yellow labrador and his impact on Grogan's life and that of his family, is top of The New York Times hardback non-fiction list, outselling Thomas Friedman's treatise on globalisation, The World Is Flat, as well as Cobra II, Michael Gordon's investigation of the invasion of Iraq. Since it was first published last year, the publishers have had to order 23 additional print runs and the title has sold about 1.2 million copies - something achieved by fewer than a dozen non-fiction titles a year.

The movie rights have been snapped up by Fox 2000 and the book is due to be published in Britain this summer by Stodder & Houghton. So just why has this simple book been such a soaring success in the US and can that achievement be matched in the UK?

"I think that after the controversy of James Frey [the bestselling author who admitted parts of his purportedly real-life memoir was fabricated] and everything else that is going on in the world at the moment ... this is an old-fashioned story that really speaks to people," said Seale Ballenger, a senior publicist at HarperCollins, whose Morrow imprint has published the book in the US. "It's about the love a dog brings to a family. It's a love story about a family ... People are looking for something warm and sweet."

Grogan's book is certainly that. In essence it is the sometimes cutesy tale of the 13 years that he and his wife Jenny spent with their lovable, manic dog Marley - named after the late Jamaican reggae singer - before they had to have him put down in December 2003. It details the births of their three children, a miscarriage, moving house and their growing as a family - accompanied throughout by their energy-filled animal who is so destructive around the home that at one point they consider getting rid of him.

Dog owners will find few surprises in the descriptions about the highs and lows of having a pet - the chewed-up furniture and drooled-on-clothes as well as the laughter and joy and sheer fun - that are contained within its 300 or so pages. And certainly no one who has ever had to make the horrible decision to telephone the vet and have an ailing, elderly pet put down will be surprised that Grogan, too, found it difficult to go through this pain with his beloved Marley. As one reviewer somewhat off-handedly summarised Grogan's story: "Puppies - Man's best friend, but it's sad when they die."

If Grogan - a columnist on the local news section of The Philadelphia Inquirer newspaper - had left things there, that would probably have been it. Instead his story has been pitched as something of a folksy, self-help guide, an easy-to-understand lesson for people in a country that apparently cannot get enough of books designed to better oneself.

Indeed, in the column he penned immediately after Marley's death, Grogan wrote: "A person can learn a lot from a dog, even a loopy one like ours. Marley taught me about living each day with unbridled exuberance and joy, about seizing the moment and following your heart. He taught me to appreciate the simple things - a walk in the woods, a fresh snowfall, a nap in a shaft of winter sunlight. And as he grew old and achy, he taught me about optimism in the face of adversity. Mostly, he taught me about friendship and selflessness and, above all else, unwavering loyalty."

It was that column, published in January 2004, in which he described how he and his wife and his three young children had buried Marley in a grave at the bottom of their garden in rural Pennsylvania, that started everything. Grogan had written it as a catharsis, a way of dealing with the sadness and loss he felt after his dog's death as well as a message of farewell to his companion. But most of all he wanted to try and put his finger on the perhaps inexplicable; to try somehow to explain just how deeply a dog can enrich a person's life. He essentially wanted to explain why a dog can be a man, and a woman's, best friend.

It was immediately clear that he had hit upon something. The morning that his column appeared he arrived at work to find his answering machine full and his e-mail inbox stuffed with hundreds of messages. He normally considered his column to have successfully stirred some interest if he received a dozen replies.

This was something very different. The subject lines of the e-mail messages read "Deepest condolences", "About your loss" or else simply said "Marley". In his memoir Grogan recalls how one couple wrote: "We fully understand and we mourn for your loss and for our loss of Rusty. They'll always be missed, never truly replaced." Another person, a woman called Joyce, wrote: "Thanks for reminding us of Duncan, who lies buried in our own backyard."

Grogan says he received a total of 800 messages. "By the time I had ploughed through them all - and answered as many as I could - I felt better, as though I was part of some giant cyber-support group," he writes. "My own private mourning had become a public therapy session. And in this crowd there was no shame in admitting a real, piercing grief for something as seemingly inconsequential as an old, smelly dog."

It was this public reaction that suggested to Grogan that he might have stumbled upon the material for a book. He started that spring, rousing himself at 5am and working for a couple of hours until it was time to help get his children ready for school and go to work. All the while daffodils started to push through the earth on Marley's grave, located beneath two large cherry trees. Grogan completed a chapter a week and, working in this fashion, had finished the book by early September.

"Actually it was therapeutic, cathartic," Grogan says of the process, in a Q&A published on the book's website. (Apparently, the author has been banned by his publicist at Hodder & Stoughton from speaking to the British media ahead of book tour of the UK this summer, such are their hopes for a mass of pre-publication interest. So much for living each day with unbridled exuberance ...)

He adds: "I would read passages aloud to my children as I progressed, and it seemed to help them, too. Mostly we laughed. Bitter-sweet is probably the right word."

As to those who suggest he would have better used his time to write about something of more obvious importance, his answer is this: "I have this theory, and writing the book sharpened it, that people can learn a lot from their dogs. Lessons on how to lead happier, more fulfilling lives. Lessons for successful relationships.

"Think about it. Many of the qualities that come so effortlessly to dogs - loyalty, devotion, selflessness, unflagging optimism, unqualified love - can be elusive to humans. My hunch is that people who act more like dogs have happier marriages."

The extraordinary response of the US public to Grogan's story about Marley did not end with the publication of his book. An online forum hosted by the book's website invites readers to share their own dog stories, to swap advice about keeping pets and to leave messages for the author. Many of these are similar to the e-mail messages Grogan received after that first column.

A typical message was recently posted by "Traci731", who said: "This has been one of the best books I have ever read. I have two Labs - Casey and Milo - so I can relate to everything you went through with Marley. My old Lab (died about two years ago) was a real Houdini too ... always breaking out of his locked crate! It is amazing how these animals are not just 'pets', but special members of our family ... forever."

Britons, like Americans, are famous for being a nation of pet-lovers, and for weeping buckets over animal stories. Could Grogan's story be as much of a success in the UK (where, incidentally, the life expectancy of a labrador is a couple of years longer than in America), or will British readers find the style a little too saccharin-sweet, its message about the benefits of having a dog something that most people are already aware of?

In the UK the market for books about dogs and cats is relatively small, with total sales of about £5m a year. There have been surprise successes, however, such as Bad Cat by Jim Edgar and Cat Confidential by Vicky Halls though memoirs about individual dogs and cats are much rarer.

Neill Denny, editor of the publishing trade magazine The Bookseller, said he feared Marley and Me might be too culturally specific to do well in the UK, though he believed there might be an opening in the market. "If you'd asked me 10 years ago whether such a book would do well, I'd have said definitely no," he said. "But these days Britain and America do seem culturally much more similar. This might be the time to do a British version of this. And the cliché is true - the British are a nation of dog lovers."

Other books to get your canines into

By Ed Caesar

Flush by Virginia Woolf, 1933

A dog's-eye view of the world if ever there was one, Woolf's 1933 opus may well be the world's first canine biography. In the stream-of-consciousness style she pioneered, Woolf investigates and charts the inner life of Flush, her friend Elizabeth Barrett Browning's cocker spaniel. Flush is both a wry modernist gem and a searing parody of the contemporary trend for lengthy biography.

Jock of the Bushveld by Percy Fitzpatrick, 1907

A misty-eyed account of the author's relationship with his Staffordshire bull terrier, Jock of the Bushveld is set in late 19th century South Africa. In goldrush Transvaal, Jock, the runt of a litter, who Fitzpatrick decides to save, engages in supernumerary adventures, including losing his hearing because of a porcupine attack, while his owner works as an ox-wagon rider.

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time by Mark Haddon, 2003

The title, from the Sherlock Holmes story "Silver Blaze", is appropriate: a boy with Asperger's syndrome, Christopher, finds the body of his neighbour's dog, Wellington, and as he embarks on a hunt for Wellington's murderer, we discover more about an Asperger's-filtered world as the trail leads to an unexpected suspect.

The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle, 1901

When the eponymous canine anti-hero of Conan Doyle's classic detective story rears his ugly head again, it sounds like a case for Sherlock Holmes. The demonic dog has terrorised Baskerville Hall for generations, and, when the bodies start to heap, Holmes has to spend some lonely nights on the Grimpen Mire getting to the bottom of a ghoulish case.

The Incredible Journey by Sheila Burnford, 1961

A glowing Sunday afternoon of a novel, The Incredible Journey charts the adventures of three pets mistakenly abandoned. Luath, a reddish labrador retriever, Bodger, an old English bull terrier, and Tao, a Siamese cat, must make their way across the dangerous expanses of Ontario to meet their owners. The scene where they're reunited makes it all worthwhile.