Dean Koontz: Lessons learned from my dog

A Big Little Life

^{by Rob Kerby, Senior Editor}

“There’s something uncanny about dogs. They really understand you better than you understand yourself,” says bestselling suspense author Dean Koontz, author of the just-released Odd Apocalypse.

He has written more than 100 books - including 14 hardback and 14 paperback New York Times bestsellers. In 2008, he tied with author John Gresham as one of the highest earning writers, reporting $24 million in sales that year. His books have been translated into 48 different languages.

Although Dean Koontz is known for his suspense novels and thrillers, a few years ago, he “ghostwrote” a memoir, A Big Little Life: A Memoir of a Joyful Dog, by “Trixie Koontz – a dog,” his 60-pound golden retriever. Trixie had come to Koontz and his wife Gerda at age three, forced by an injury to retire from Canine Companions for Independence, an organization that provides assistance dogs for the handicapped. Trixie had been the companion of a young woman who had lost both her legs.

One of those intense looks

Koontz continues:

I’m something of a workaholic and when Trixie first came, I was in a habit of working from about 7 in the morning right through until 6 p.m., 6:30, even 7. The very first day that Trixie arrived, at 5 p.m. she came to my desk and stood looking over the top of it at me, giving me one of those very noble, profound, but intense golden retriever looks. I could see her behind me, her reflection in my computer screen. I thought it was funny. She stared and stared and stared and I turned. It was only then that she actually moved. She came around the side of the desk and stood looking at me and I said, “What is it? What’s wrong?”

She started pushing her head under my arm and throwing my arm off the keyboard. This dog did this every day at 5 p.m. Eventually, I gave up and said, all right – this is a new rule of life in the household, I don’t work past 5. She totally changed us.

Honest love

“Dogs’ lives are short, too short, but you know that going in. You know the pain is coming, you're going to lose a dog, and there's going to be great anguish, so you live fully in the moment with her, never fail to share her joy or delight in her innocence, because you can't support the illusion that a dog can be your lifelong companion. There's such beauty in the hard honesty of that, in accepting and giving love while always aware that it comes with an unbearable price. Maybe loving dogs is a way we do penance for all the other illusions we allow ourselves and the mistakes we make because of those illusions,” from Dean Koontz’ novel The Darkest Evening of the Year