“I kind of look like I got into a bar brawl with this scratch across my nose,” says best-selling author John Grogan before starting his lecture, “Memoir & Me: The Art of First-Person Nonfiction Narrative.” “All I can say is when I arrived on campus, they warned me to fear the Gopher, and I didn’t listen,” he continues.
After penning, Marley & Me, and following up the success with his memoir The Longest Trip Home, Grogan says he has a lot more stories in him. If you’re looking for more details about just what the next project will entail, however, you’re somewhat out of luck.
When pressed by President Sanford Ungar about future plans in the Hyman Forum recently for his lecture, Grogan mentioned an interest in fiction-writing. Otherwise, he deftly dodged the question. It seems like a skill he may have learned as journalist dealing with difficult sources, or while on tour for his New York Times best-selling book Marley & Me, which topped the charts for 23 weeks and remained there for over 70.
“I’ve been taking the last few months to find my balance now,” Grogan responds with poise that comes after being on tour for such a long time. He has, after all, published two books and a children’s series based on Marley & Me. Additionally, he worked on the 2008 movie about the “world’s worst dog” and the ways his family grew, starring Owen Wilson and Jennifer Aniston.
Contrasted to the hectic schedule required for all of his speaking engagements, Grogan says writing his books has been a “catharsis” for him. He remembers back to when he and his wife Jenny, who he met as a police reporter for Michigan’s Herald-Palladium, lived in Florida years ago. “We were going through life as this young couple, [and] all young couples are trying to figure life out,” he says. “In the midst of this process, we had this crazy, nutty dog turning our lives upside-down and really changing us in meaningful ways, [and] making us different people.” According to Grogan, Marley really taught him and his wife a lot about patience, responsibility and being grown-ups.
He eventually realized that his first book would center on this topic, reaffirmed by the hundreds of positive responses he received for an Inquirer column about Marley. “One day, I woke up and thought, ‘Maybe the book I was meant to write has been lying right here at my feet this whole time. [It’s] not a story about a dog, and not even a story about a family with a dog, but [rather] the story of a family in the making,” he says.
There’s more to the tale than just the successful column, continues Grogan. “I really owe this dog the other part of the story. For years, I trotted him out at cocktail parties in front of friends and told these funny stories about… how we got saddled with the world’s worst dog. They were all true stories and funny stories…, but there was another side…, too. It was about the role that [Marley] played in forming us as a whole and complete family,” he says.
That family, according to President Ungar, has actually become a part of Goucher’s community. Patrick, the Grogans’ oldest son, is a freshman at the college this year, explains President Ungar with pride before the small group that gathered together in the Athenaeum’s Forum. He brought up the same sentiment at his President’s House, which was filled hours previously. After guests mingled in dresses and suits in the dimly lit, but ornately furnished house, they were led to tables decorated with fancy floral arrangements of colorful, springtime flowers. Throughout the evening, friends of President Ungar, professors, alumni and current students celebrated Grogan’s accomplishments and his new, familial connection to Goucher.
Fitting with the theme of the night, Grogan talks of Marley & Me in much the same way as a proud father might discuss a praiseworthy child to others. It’s this commitment to family that Grogan seems to value most, and which he seeks to portray through his memoirs. “I think the reason my book took off like it did and really translated across many cultures is the very ordinariness of the story. It’s just an average, everyday couple dealing with the stuff that everyday families deal with. For whatever reason, that resonated,” he says.
For more Goucher events, click here.
For more on Grogan’s visit to Goucher, see Shay Kettner’s article for The Quindecim here, or her blog post.
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