Afterglow (a dog memoir)

by Eileen Myles

Overview

“A ravishingly strange and gorgeous book about a dog that’s really about life and everything there is…astonishing.” —Helen Macdonald, New York Times-bestselling author of H Is for Hawk

In 1990, poet Eileen Myles chose Rosie from a litter of pit bulls on the street, and their connection instantly became central to the writer's life and work. During the course of their sixteen years together, Myles was madly devoted to the dog’s well-being, especially in her final days. Starting from the emptiness following Rosie's death, Afterglow launches a heartfelt and fabulist investigation into the true nature of the bond between pet and pet owner. Through this lens, we witness Myles’s experiences with intimacy and spirituality, celebrity and politics, alcoholism and recovery, fathers and family history, as well as the fantastical myths we spin to get to the heart of grief.

Moving from an imaginary talk show where Rosie is interviewed by Myles’s childhood puppet to a critical reenactment of the night Rosie mated with another pit bull, from lyrical transcriptions of their walks to Rosie’s enlightened narration from the afterlife, Afterglow illuminates all that it can mean when we dedicate our existence to a dog.

“Myles gets at something no other dog book I’ve read has gotten at quite this distinctly: The sense of wordless connection and spiritual expansion you feel when you love and are loved by a creature who’s not human…raw and affecting.” —Maureen Corrigan, Fresh Air, NPR

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780802188786
Publisher:	Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Publication date:	02/26/2020
Series:	Books That Changed the World
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	224
Sales rank:	520,196
File size:	4 MB

About the Author

Eileen Myles is the author of more than twenty books, including Afterglow (a dog memoir), Inferno (a poet’s novel), Chelsea Girls, and Cool For You. Myles’s many honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, four Lambda Literary Awards, the Clark Prize for Excellence in Arts Writing, as well as grants from Creative Capital (nonfiction) and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts (poetry), and the Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers grant.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

One day, in 1999, an awkward hand-addressed letter appeared in my hallway.

The mailman threw everything on the stairs. I grabbed the letter & headed with Rosie to the dog run which in that neighborhood was a skimpy little triangle at 39 th Street west of 9th Ave. It was an amazing perspective on mid-town roofs and also dull traffic heading to New Jersey. My neighbors were weird. Sad former actors. I liked the pink-cheeked older woman named Doris who walked everyone in the neighborhood's dogs including mine. This is like sixteen years ago so Doris is probably dead. Sitting on a bench while Rosie sniffed the ground I tore open the strange note. It read:

Dear Eileen,

I take the liberty of calling you "Eileen" to begin the unpleasant duty of forcing you to legally take responsibility for the damages you have inflicted over a period of nine years upon the being you have taken to calling "Rosie." I am Rosie's lawyer. Dog lawyers have only become possible in recent years, even months. Which is not to say crimes of all kinds against dogs are "new" in any way. Crimes against dogs are ancient and widespread, but dogs having the wherewithal to attain legal representation is new indeed. My services have been retained thanks to a generous bequest by an anonymous donor who set up a foundation in her will for the explicit purpose of identifying dogs who were likely litigants, candidates for beginning the long and arduous process of getting the ball rolling on dogs' rights. It's been clear to my client during her life and most pressingly at the time of her death that the best way to make this need known would be to take up an individual dog's case, not the case of "all dogs" which is too ubiquitous to pursue in the explicit way the law makes possible for human litigants, who are generally assumed to be individuals. A wealthy individual, of course, does not have more rights than a poor one. We are all brought up to honor "human rights," but only wealthy humans are able to use the full force of the law; i.e., obtain high quality representation. By this logic, there can be no freedom for dogs unless there are wealthy dogs. There is one today, the dog formerly known as Rosie. She has been left a significant sum of money in my client's will. She may spend it as she pleases with the single stipulation that she obtain counsel and press charges against her owner for a variety of abuses and crimes against dog kind. As you know, Eileen Myles, that owner is you.

It seemed unbelievable to me. Rosie was about ten. I looked at her licking an empty wrapper against the fence. She appeared entirely innocent of the letter's content. What? Are we already going home she seemed to say. Okay. I don't think she knows anything about this. I popped the leash back on and walked home planning my day. The loft we lived in was right across from Port Authority. Day and night I watched the lights of buses sail in and out of the building. I thought about the letter from time to time. I mean for years. I showed it to people. They laughed and smiled. Could Rosie and my entire relationship be framed as blame. I did force her to have sex with Buster that one time. No twice. Could I write a book about that. I've never been an "idea" writer. I have like a spurt then I go do something else. But this would be her book. A dog book is a great idea ...

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "Afterglow"
by .
Copyright © 2017 Eileen Myles.
Excerpted by permission of Grove Atlantic, Inc..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

[The Letter] 1

Protect Me You 4

My Dog/My God 11

The Death of Rosie 25

The Puppets' Talk Show 28

Goodnight, Sweet Queen 44

The Rape of Rosie 60

Just Before and Just After 66

x (transcription) 76

My Father Came Again as a Dog 88

xx 88

FOAM 93

xxx 105

The Navel 108

The Order of Drinking (3-D) 112

xxxx 136

Dog House 141

"The Dog's Journey" 157

To the Post Office 176

The Walk 197

Editorial Reviews

…Eileen Myles's winning new memoir…is unflinching but also irrepressibly humorous. Her grief at losing Rosie is profound; it is also a revelation…Myles possesses, in abundance, two qualities of the highest value for a writer, irreverence and relentless curiosity, and here both are on full display. As a prose writer she is naturally, even obsessively, digressive, and the book's loose, nonlinear form allows her to riff or ruminate on what can seem at times like a maniacal range of subjects…Given how deeply concerned it is with loss, Afterglow is inescapably a sad book, but, because it is a love story, and because, like any serious book about death, it is full of life, it has a celebratory feel to it…The writing here, by turns playful, heartfelt, wise, compassionate, fantastical and audaciously confessional, should please many.

The New York Times Book Review - Sigrid Nunez

06/19/2017
Poet and novelist Myles (Inferno) reflects on 16 years with their pit bull Rosie. Inspired by Rosie’s death, Myles uses a pastiche approach to explore the bodily, cerebral, and esoteric/religious aspects of the grieving process, all of which is portrayed with meditative poignancy. The feeling of watching a beloved pet’s decline is rendered bittersweet: “Our present had a pastness to it every day.” There is humor, as the author recalls a fruitless attempt to breed Rosie (“I wondered if I was doing something illegal. Letting dogs have sex in my building”). There’s a chapter written as the transcript of a surrealist puppet show, wherein Rosie informs the audience that she has been writing Myles’s material since 1990. Myles also brings Hitler’s art, 14th-century tapestries, and Abu Ghraib into the narrative, and writes in the voice of Bo Jean Harmonica, an alter ego of sorts whose gender is categorized pithily: “I’m a man but there’s a woman in it.” Though there are occasional meandering thematic digressions, these seem a part of the journey. Myles depicts the raw pathos of loss with keen insight. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

Praise for Afterglow (a dog memoir)

“Unflinching but also irrepressibly humorous. [Myles’s] grief at losing Rosie is profound; it is also a revelation . . . Myles possesses, in abundance, two qualities of the highest value for a writer, irreverence and relentless curiosity, and here both are on full display . . . because [Afterglow] is a love story, and because, like any serious book about death, it is full of life, it has a celebratory feel to it . . . the writing here, by turns playful, heartfelt, wise, compassionate, fantastical and audaciously confessional, should please many.” —Sigrid Nunez, New York Times Book Review

“Afterglow is a mutt elegy in a million . . . Myles gets at something no other dog book I’ve read has gotten at quite this distinctly: The sense of wordless connection and spiritual expansion you feel when you love and are loved by a creature who’s not human . . . It’s raw and affecting, and in its wild snuffling way, utterly original.” —Maureen Corrigan, Fresh Air, NPR

“You’ll laugh, and you’ll cry, yes, but you’ll also think hard, as you work to pull together the many disparate, cosmic, and charming notions Myles sets forth . . . with quicksilver intellect and whimsy fully engaged . . . [Afterglow is] wry, far-flung, and wonderfully loving.” —Matthew Gilbert, Boston Globe

“Afterglow portrays a complex and often hilarious relationship between two animals, characterized by love and deep interrogation of power, creativity, and point of view . . . for Myles, a dog becomes the surrogate for a sort of vicarious enlightenment . . . an ever-deepening investigation into the nature of human-being-ness, self-knowledge, and knowing things outside of yourself . . . A book that’s wise to miscommunication but hungry to overcome it, Afterglow celebrates that rare authorial ability to get out of one’s own way and show us a singular and limber mind roaming free.” —Melissa Broder, Bookforum

“Fantastical . . . wrenching . . . obsession becomes a way to process grief.” —Helena Fitzgerald, Rolling Stone

“To read Eileen Myles is to feel as if the poet, after spotting you across the room at a crowded party, has guided you by the elbow to a private corner to confide their personal theories of the universe. Afterglow is just that intimate. Part elegy, part meditation, part performance art . . . poignant, sweeping.” —Claire Luchette, O, the Oprah Magazine

“Tender, lyrical.” —Jarry Lee, Buzzfeed, one of 28 Exciting New Books You Need To Read

“Myles’s storytelling is as unconventional and allusive as ever, ranging from an imaginary talk show featuring Rosie as a guest to the more quotidian joys of loving an animal.” —Estelle Tang, Elle, one of the Best Books to Read This Fall

“The universal theme of attachment shines through in Eileen Myles’s unconventional Afterglow . . . With great candor, Myles uses the emotional intimacy of a human’s relationship with a dog to discuss larger questions of emotional intimacy . . . Afterglow illustrates the lasting bond between humans and dogs in a new way.” —Tobias Carroll, Portland Press Herald

“[Afterglow aims] to catalog life in gritty, naturalistic stills that, when amassed over time, form a lyrical whole, like a good grunge song . . . Myles works to bridge the power discrepancies between owner and dog, author and subject.” —Maddie Crum, Los Angeles Review of Books

“Wild and unruly . . . lively, conversational, and highly intelligent . . . [a] sincere elegiac reflection on a life shared with another being. Afterglow is a book about dogs, as well as the lessons of caretaking and intuition that they teach us, but it’s also a book about listening and observing, about how we communicate and how we relate.” —Caroline Tompkin, Vice

“[Afterglow] incomparably materializes the imagination one uses when relating to a pet.” —Rachel Davies, Nylon

“Extraordinary . . . moving without being maudlin . . . Afterglow brings language to the nonverbal intimacy of a human life lived with a dog.” —Nathan Goldman, Literary Hub

“Offbeat . . . whimsical but philosophical.” —Tom Beer, Newsday

“[A] mixture of celebration and elegy . . . Eileen makes words bite and lick at weirdly sensitive regions never previously detected.” —Charlie Fox, Spike

“Afterglow stretches the boundaries of memoir, blending fact and fable. Raucous and elegiac, hilarious and heartbreaking, the book explores not only Myles’ relationship with Rosie, but family and trauma; politics (including Myles’ 1991-2 presidential campaign); memory; and poetry.” —Alyssa Greene, Lambda Literary

“Myles’s work is a perfect example of what happens when you mix raw language with emotion, pets with loss, and sexuality with socioculturalism. A captivating look at a poet’s repeated attempt ‘to dig a hole in eternity’ through language.” —Kirkus Review (starred review)

“A rare new breed of dog memoir; think Patti Smith’s Just Kids, not Josh Grogan’s Marley and Me, absinthe not saccharine.” —Library Journal (starred review)

“Poetic, heartrending, soothing, and funny, this is a mind-expanding contemplation of creation, the act and the noun, and the creatures whose deaths we presume will precede ours but whose lives make our own better beyond reason. To this, readers should bring tissues, pencil and paper, even their dogs.” —Booklist (starred review)

“Myles uses a pastiche approach to explore the bodily, cerebral, and esoteric/religious aspects of the grieving process, all of which is portrayed with meditative poignancy . . . Myles depicts the raw pathos of loss with keen insight.” —Publishers Weekly

“A ravishingly strange and gorgeous book about a dog that’s really about life and everything there is, Afterglow is a truly astonishing creation.” ―Helen Macdonald, author of the New York Times bestseller H Is for Hawk

“What is a dog if not god? In Afterglow, Eileen Myles steps up to the challenge for writers to function as prophets. Ghostwritten in part by deceased pit bull Rosie, this ‘dog memoir’ explores―among other things―geometry, gender, mortality, evil, aging, and plaids. Myles makes new rules for what prose writing can be. Afterglow is Myles’s funniest, profoundest work yet.” ―Chris Kraus, author of I Love Dick and After Kathy Acker

“Part eulogy, part homage, part love-letter, part madcap scrapbook . . . Love and loss are replayed and reimagined through the paranormal and surreal just as against the everyday and the earthly; the familial, communal, spiritual, sexual and bestial are all enlisted to spin the story of one special canine and her human. Only Eileen Myles could reinvent the memoir again so stunningly; Afterglow is the sort of multidimensional love story you could only expect from one of our greatest experimental writers living today!” —Porochista Khakpour, author of The Last Illusion and Sick: A Life of Lyme, Love, Illness, and Addiction

“Following Eileen Myles around a dog is like following Leopold Bloom around Dublin. Reading Afterglow is like entering the company of a sensibility that is rich, original, witty, and tonally brilliant. It is the darting asides, the phrasing and the subplots that matter most in this book, that give pure, sheer constant pleasure.” —Colm Tóibín, author of House of Names

“Everything Eileen Myles touches turns to poetry. Whether called a dog or a cat, it’s always poetry. Emily Dickinson famously decided that poetry was anything that made her ‘feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off.’ I can imagine Emily Dickinson writing an ecstatic blurb for Myles’s tender, trippy, deep, yet humanely silly new gift to the world: Afterglow. In this age of fake news and even fake poetry, trust this voice!” ―Brad Gooch, author of Smash Cut and Rumi’s Secret

“What astounds me about Afterglow is the way in which Myles’s mourning of the dog Rosie’s death leads to surprising landscapes of thought in the language, where between sentences you’re walking out into vast open-air arenas and every time you do this some new light goes on in your brain. You think you’re reading about Eileen and a dog. You are reading about them, but with the complexities of their closeness always pointing farther up the field, asking why we’re here, what we’re going to do and with whom are we going to do it.” —Renee Gladman, author of Calamities

“Wildly inventive and just plain wild, feral, even, Eileen Myles’s dazzling Afterglow is about a dog, and her owner, and everything else in life, and also death, too.” ―Jami Attenberg, author of The Middlesteins and All Grown Up

From the Publisher

★ 06/15/2017
Myles—poet, novelist, feminist presidential candidate, professor, librettist, nonfiction writer, inspiration for the lesbian poet character Leslie Mackinaw on the show Transparent, and Guggenheim fellow—has written a love letter to her beloved pit bull Rosie. Myles's phantasmagoric account of her 16 years with Rosie—and many years without her—includes not only a sorrowful retelling of decline and illness but also a recital of the facts of Rosie's first mating, in the nerve-wracking chapter "The Rape of Rosie," as well as various imaginings of Rosie's thoughts (not to mention her remarks as a talk show guest). Myles wanders through complicated family relationships, a history of alcoholism, and her credo of writing on her way to delivering a singular portrait of Rosie. Readers in search of an anodyne for their grief will find it buried deep in the midst of her swirling prose. VERDICT Myles succeeds here in producing a rare new breed of dog memoir: think Patti Smith's Just Kids, not John Grogan's Marley and Me, absinthe not saccharine. [See Prepub Alert, 5/3/17.]—Therese Purcell Nielsen, Huntington P.L., NY

Library Journal

★ 2017-05-21
A memoir that stretches the limits of its genre by making a dog the textual centerpiece. Notorious poet Myles (I Must Be Living Twice: New and Selected Poems 1975-2014, 2015, etc.) strikes again with an irreverently poetic memoir that traces her experience losing her pit bull Rosie. The book begins with a hand-addressed letter Myles received in 1999 that reads, "I take the liberty…of forcing you to legally take responsibility for the damages you have inflicted over a period of nine years upon the being you have taken to calling ‘Rosie.' I am Rosie's lawyer." From there, the author spirals into an introspective look at what it means to be a dog and to be at the mercy of another human. Myles divides the book into a series of mostly brief episodes—some true, some made-up, many experimental in structure and tone—that reflect Rosie's thoughts as well as the author's experiences with her own thoughts, but it never becomes overly nostalgic or sad. "The past is so often a place whose colors are only in my mind," writes Myles. Certainly, readers may feel like much of the narrative's meat happens offstage, but that's part of the author's charm. "I like to make it heavier sometimes. Saying versions of the same thing," she writes, "I mean here. You probably already guessed it but I like saying it again. That one little piece again with a twist. And a thud. I don't feel this way about everything but there are moments that need to be heavy. As a fact. Not an idea." Rarely too heavy to be approachable, Myles' work is a perfect example of what happens when you mix raw language with emotion, pets with loss, and sexuality with socioculturalism. A captivating look at a poet's repeated attempt "to dig a hole in eternity" through language.

Kirkus Reviews