Indeed, the entire book reads like a journal, with deeply personal and idiosyncratic meditations on the ontological potential of foam the possibility that her dog is the reincarnation of her alcoholic father and imagined interjections about the writing process from Rosie the dog: ''Oh yeah, very tasteful dog book. Yeah well how about my whole long life, Eileen.'ĭog-loving readers will recognise certain human/canine experiences that are virtually obligatory in all pet memoirs, such as the attempt to mate our furry friends with a fertile companion the always terrible day when they're taken to the vet to be desexed and eventual loss of health and mobility that is as heartbreaking as it is inevitable.Įarly in the book certain passages appear to have the shambolic and compressed quality of diary entries, and this similarity is confirmed towards the end of it, when a narrator called Bo Jean Harmonica confesses that she has lifted her text from the journal of Eileen Myles. and oh yeah and when I was dying, get this, when they're wheeling me around town like a man who has money – then she writes on her legal pad 'puppet, puppetry'. Rosie is on an author tour discussing the ways in which her owner has misused her in life, and also in death: '. The live TV audience also consists of puppets. And I’ve been people other than your father.Continuing to play with form, in chapter five the author delivers the text of a short, animated script, in which an imagined television interview is conducted between Rosie and a talk show-host that happens to be a puppet. Which I think you understand now is an intuition. And we will continue now with our weaving. And dogs become human that way and this transmigration of souls is a very Irish thing, remarked upon persistently in literature. Your grandmother entered into Peggy because that’s what people do all the time. I need to finish this tapestry, be done with your book and resume my own travelling. Because you want to cover some land in the time you’ve got left. You need to go on and especially now you need to go fast. To be a deep and constant well of sadness is a very real thing but it does not mean that you should go either right or left.

Afterglow by Eileen Myles