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And Now I See
As she prepares a puppy to
be a guide dog, author secretly finds life in
art and art in life.
By Roxanne Hawn
 When the family cat slipped into a kitchen cabinet,
Deena—a middle-aged mother of three with
a nest well on its way to being empty—reached
in to retrieve him and wound up wedged against
the lazy Susan. “How did I end up here?” Deena
wondered. “Not here in the cupboard, but
here as the owner of a cat, much less a fat,
white Persian cat. I’m a dog person.” Soon
after this revelation, she decides to raise a
guide dog as a distraction from a daily life
of motherhood, marital strife and menopause.
K-9 Eyes assigns Heloise, a 10-week-old yellow
Lab, to Deena. On the drive home, the puppy yelps
all the way. She scares the aforementioned cat
into hiding on top of the refrigerator, anoints
the floor four times between dinner and bed-time
and whines all night long. The next day, she
leaves a stinky pile in the bedroom closet, throws
up (then re-consumes) her breakfast, snacks from
the litter box and nibbles on the kitchen cabinets.
So much for the first 24 hours!
Deena isn’t real. Neither is Heloise.
They are the heroines of Elizabeth Wrenn’s
first novel, Around the Next Corner (NAL/Penguin),
which is the often funny, occasionally weepy
tale of a woman’s second coming-of-age.
Fortunately, says Wrenn with a laugh, “No
one in my life was as bad as anyone in my book.”
Wrenn’s Inspiration
A handful of Oprah episodes inspired Wrenn to
think about this mid-life shift. According to
the author, the idea came to her “all at
once, a lightning bolt strike of the muse.” As
she explains, “What if, I wondered, a woman
who’d lost herself in her roles of wife
and mother learned some new lessons about pack
behavior, trust, unconditional love, loss and—most
importantly—about herself by raising a
service puppy.”
Buy
Elizabeth Wrenn's novel, Around the Next
Corner
Photo
courtesy of Brown-Shepherd Photography
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