Some of the most powerful memoirs ever written aren’t about a marriage, a childhood, or a career. They’re about a dog. Or a horse. Or a cat who showed up on a porch one winter and never left. If you’ve been wanting to write a memoir about your pet, you’re in good company.
Do You Want to Write a Memoir About Your Pet?
There are wonderful memoirs available that focus on the writer’s relationship with an animal companion. Here are just a few:
- H Is for Hawk, by Helen Macdonald, is a memoir about grief and how a goshawk helped Macdonald heal.
- Alex & Me, by Irene Pepperberg, is the story of Pepperberg’s decades-long partnership with an African grey parrot who could talk.
- Wesley the Owl, by Stacey O’Brien, follows O’Brien’s relationship with a barn owl she raised and lived with for nineteen years.
- Enslaved by Ducks, by Bob Tarte, tells of a household slowly overtaken by rescued birds and other animals.
Writing a Memoir About Your Pet Can Be a Depth Charge
When we write a pet memoir, we aren’t really writing about the animal—or not entirely. Like any other compelling memoir, a pet memoir is about the relationship. In this case, the one you had with your animal. The joys and sorrows they brought. What they taught you. How you changed because of them.
A dog’s long illness can help us understand more about our own mortality. Earning a rescue horse’s trust can awaken our ability to trust more deeply. These are the types of understandings—internal arcs—we bring to writing a memoir about our pets.
It can be tempting to want to write just the positive, the obvious: “She was the best cat in the world” or “He loved me unconditionally.” While these things are undoubtedly true, mining the deeper truths will gain you the gold that lives beneath the surface of your good dog’s life. And that is what makes the story you and your pet lived worth reading for those who didn’t know them.
Avoid Sentimentality When Writing a Memoir About Your Pet
Pet memoir can be hard to write well. Why? Because it can so easily slide into sentimentality, asking for an emotional response the story hasn’t fully earned. Your readers are likely to be animal lovers. That means they show up to your story primed to sympathize. But if the writing leans too heavily on that built-in goodwill, instead of specific, honest storytelling, the emotions can start to feel manipulative. Then the book will feel thin even to readers who love animals.
Try as often as you can to offer your reader specificity, rather than declarations. In other words, “show, don’t tell.” So, instead of telling your reader that the bond you had with your pet was “special,” show exactly what that looked like.
Write scenes of having conversations with your pup in the car. Or of times when your cat (horse, rabbit, goat …) insisted on “helping” with a project that would have been finished in half the time without their “support.”
And then, of course, there are the tough moments. The day she didn’t come to the door. The new wobble when he walked. The vet visit you didn’t see coming. Concrete, particular experiences—positive or otherwise—carry emotional weight in ways that abstractions like “smart,” “funny,” or “loyal” just can’t.
Capturing Your Pet’s Personality on the Pages of Your Memoir
Personality is where a pet memoir gets to be funny, warm, and alive—not just meaningful. To get their personality on the page, make lists of the odd, specific stuff they’d do. The food she’d refuse to eat unless it came from your hand. The spot on the couch he defended like it was his job. The pitch of the bark that meant “someone’s at the door” versus the one that meant “I’m bored and it’s your fault.”
Anne Kaier, author of the memoir Home With Henry, suggests going through old photos to notice your pet’s typical poses. This will help you remember their small, repeated gestures, which make a character feel specific rather than generic.
These are the same tools a novelist uses to build a human character—habits, contradictions, comic timing. They work just as well to help us share our four-legged (or winged) ones with our readers. John Grogan relies on exactly this kind of detail in Marley & Me to make us fall in love with his dog Marley.
Deciding How Big the Story Is
Not every pet story needs to be a full-length book. Some are best as a single chapter inside a larger memoir. Your relationship with your red hen may have been one relationship among many that shaped your childhood. But some animals in our lives definitely need a book of their own. Those are the ones whose story runs alongside our own transformative experiences. For instance, how helping an abused dog heal helped us survive the first year after losing a partner
Real Examples Worth Studying
Mark Doty’s Dog Years uses two dogs as a way into a memoir about grief and the AIDS crisis. The animals matter, but the book is doing larger work through them. Ted Kerasote’s Merle’s Door stays close to one dog’s life, using it to explore questions about freedom and companionship.
In both books, the dogs are not the subject—or not entirely. Instead, these two authors use their dogs’ presence to approach something broader. Whether it’s grief, or freedom, or what it means to belong to another creature, the dogs in these stories carry readers to the deeper meaning the writers are aiming for.
Try This
Think back over the animals who have shared your life. What would it mean to write about one of them? Not just remember them, but honor what they gave you by putting it into words someone else could read?
Then try this: write a page describing your pet as a full character—the way they moved, what they wanted, the quirks that only you know about. When you’re done, write a second page, this page as if your pet were describing you—your habits, your moods, your quirks.
Sometimes the truest thing you can write about a relationship comes out sideways, through someone else’s eyes—even when that someone else has four legs.
Writing a memoir about your pet can be a wonderful tribute and make a powerful story. If you’re ready to write a memoir about your pet, I can help. Visit my contact page, and let’s connect. You might also be interested in my books: Plotting Your Novel with the Plot Clock and Jamie Helps Mel Write a Novel.