What Is a Dog?
A Memoir

On the heels of her family’s beloved dog’s death, one woman returns to the canines of her past in order to imagine the human she must become in the future in this thoughtful memoir.

Chloe Shaw is in a dog house of her own choosing. A married mother with kids, the death of Booker, her children’s first family pet, has left her reeling and reckoning with her lifelong relationship with dogs. Unable to shake the feeling a year later, she asks her family for some time alone to be with nothing but her thoughts and remaining canines, Otter and Safari—only to find the dogs of her past pawing at her every memory and running, sticks in mouths, back into her life.

What follows is a meditation on one woman’s life in dog years. Since she was a child, Shaw had learned to escape the hardest parts of being human by immersing herself in the lives of her canine companions, an adaptive attachment that carried her to adulthood. Yet, in marriage and motherhood, Shaw finds herself facing her most human struggles yet. Her old ways of “being” the dog in the face of hardship prove destructive, and it’s not until she’s able to love herself and let the dogs be dogs that can she truly thrive as a person, and show up for the family who needs her to be their person.

With artful prose and a philosophical touch, Shaw's What Is a Dog? takes us on an emotional journey dog lovers everywhere will connect with—because as she discovers, dogs do more than just make our lives better—they quietly (and sometimes loudly) pull us boldly toward the person we were always meant to be.

A Macmillan Audio production from Flatiron Books