"Becoming a Dog" by CarolyN Parkhurst

Photo by Nina Subin

​Carolyn Parkhurst holds an MFA in fiction from American University. She is the author of two previous bestselling novels, The Dogs of Babel and Lost and Found, as well as a children’s book, Cooking with Henry and Elliebelly. She lives in Washington, D. C., with her husband and their two children.

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Amy Dawson Robertson is the author of two thrillers, Miles to Go and Scapegoat, and two romantic comedy novellas, Midnight in Orlando and Midnight on a Mountaintop. She also writes short stories and is published by Orca: A Literary Journal. She lives and works in Washington, DC. Her writing is nurtured by her large male cat, Albert.

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Introduction to "Becoming a Dog"
By Amy Dawson Robertson

What first comes to mind when thinking of Carolyn Parkhurst’s work is her ability to create a seemingly infinite number of high concept grab-you-by-the-seat-of your-pants premises. It is a captivating array of central ideas that readers of any stripe (i.e. commercial and literary) would be drawn to and yet manages to be chock full of fine writing, fully wrought characters, and explorations of the human condition. It is a little like hiding a pill in a spoonful of peanut butter. Your dog will never be the wiser.

One of the myriad pleasures of Parkhurst’s work is that it is so, so funny. Not rolling around on the floor funny, which would be unusual for works of such scope and breadth, but a steady flow of mirth is guaranteed. Unsurprisingly, Parkhurst herself is funny. (Must see: the book trailer for Nobodies Album where she spoofs herself, performing the part of an egomaniacal writer.) The tone of “Becoming a Dog” is an outlier. It has a weightier, more solemn mien. The humor is there but it has a darker aspect.

Published in 2004 in Grace and Gravity, the year after the release of her New York Times bestselling The Dogs of Babel, an unnamed woman in her early twenties realizes quite suddenly that she is in love with her best friend, Allison. But she is hampered by her inability to admit it: “I sat there and watched her, and all I could think of was the way she looked and the stupid way the words stayed stuck to my tongue.” The story is about the imbalance of power that can occur in any relationship. It is also about wanting and being unable to say what you want, about feeling powerless. In our interview, Parkhurst told me, “A lot of my characters feel isolated for one reason or another, and they fear betrayal and abandonment from the people they love most.” 

Parkhurst has said she has a strong preference for writing in the first person, liking how it is “so immediate, and you’re right there in the person’s head.” Here that point of view creates an almost hothouse intimacy. It feels as if the protagonist is suffocating in a claustrophobic silence of her own making.

Old Mother Hubbard, the nursery rhyme, is used as a kind of scaffold for the story. Like many old rhymes and fairy tales, it is not a balm. It is odd and funny and unsettling. The framework allows the narrative to make the leap it takes in the wholly unexpected and surprising ending, enabling the fantastical to breach a story otherwise grounded in realism.

Originally from Massachusetts, Parkhurst was an early and voracious reader. She enjoyed Roald Dahl and Judy Blume and her first publishing credit was a story called “I Am a Museum Skeleton” which received kudos in the local newspaper for its Halloween contest. She studied English at Wesleyan. After relocating to DC with her future husband, she served her time working in a bookstore before completing the MFA program in creative writing at American University. When speaking of how she comes up with ideas for her work, she says she often begins with an image that generates questions she is then required to answer.

Parkhurst was in her early thirties when she published her first book, the breakout hit, The Dogs of Babel (2003, which began as an MFA writing assignment!). The  novel is about the strange turns a man’s grief takes after the sudden death of his wife. The only witness to her death is the family dog. The widower, a linguistics professor, decides he will attempt to teach the dog to speak. The book was selected as a Book-of-the-Month club offering. One review cites Parkhurst’s “literary arsenal,” comprising “layers of allegory, symbolism, and mythic reference.”

Instead of returning to familiar territory for Lost and Found (2006), a tempting prospect, I would imagine due to the success of Dogs of Babel, Parkhurst, in her second novel, diverges into a satirical story of a mother and a daughter with a secret who compete with other pairs in an Amazing Race style reality show. Here she ambitiously writes seven different points-of-view, explicating the inner lives of the contestants. 

Nobodies Album (2010) might be the most intricately structured of the four books. She told me it was “probably my favorite to write” while also being the most challenging. Here the writer protagonist has taken on the unusual task of rewriting the last chapters of her seven published novels. Populating the fictive dream completely, Parkhurst even wrote lyrics for her musician character along with the final and newly-imagined final chapters of her protagonist writer’s oeuvre. In my favorite of these fictional texts, she writes with tender insight from the point of view of an infant. I found it riveting, enlightening and, ultimately, devastating. Parkhurst includes these texts interspersed throughout the primary narrative where her son, a rock star, has been accused of murdering his girlfriend.

​A productive year, 2010 also found Parkhurst publishing a children's book. Cooking with Henry and Elliebelly is a story about an episode of Henry and Elliebelly’s pretend cooking show, an offering one review characterized as the “my-sibling-is-driving-me-crazy genre.”

In Harmony (2016), a mother, desperate to help her unruly autistic daughter, uproots her family—a husband and a younger daughter—from their DC home to join a rule-bound utopian community that promises help for children with problems. Ultimately, the camp takes on the hallmarks of a cult. 

Though chiefly known for her novel-length works, “Becoming a Dog,” at just four pages, spans a period of about a year and includes numerous settings as Parkhurst dexterously walks the line between the commonplace and the magical with complete authority. In that brief space, she achieves a story that is moving and evocative and incredibly efficient. I was struck by her handling of sexuality in the story. It was treated matter-of-factly; questions of orientation do not arise, making it feel slightly ahead of its time with a more contemporary take on identity than 2004.

“Becoming a Dog,” like The Dogs of Babel, had its start in an AU workshop, this one led by visiting writer Shay Youngblood. Parkhurst described to me the unique writing exercise that launched the story. Paired off with another student, each was instructed to share a dream and then write a story based on it. In the dream, her partner “turned into a dog in order to avoid something unpleasant.” This was how the fabulist element found its way into the story. “I haven’t written very much fantasy or magical realism, but I’ve always liked writing in which magical elements pop up in an otherwise realistic world,” Parkhurst explained. 

When I asked her if she thought there were any through-lines in her work, she said that she writes “a lot about interiority and secrets, the difference between inner life and outer life, and the difficulty of wanting to fully know another person (and to be known in return) but finding that there are barriers that prevent that.” 

I think another through-line in the work might be acts of rebellion by her protagonists. Rebellion against the academic establishment in a search for truth. Rebellion against literary conventions: who says a book is finished just because it is published? Rebellion against mainstream medicine, against mainstream solutions. Ultimately, the rebellion in “Becoming a Dog” may be about wanting something simpler, having the courage to resist the thorny complexities of a traditional coupling. After all, love can be scary.

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Click here to learn more about Carolyn Parkhurst's work.