Good Boy

My Life in Seven Dogs

By: Jennifer Finney Boylan

Narrated by: Kelsey Navarro, Jennifer Finney Boylan

Length: 7 hrs and 42 mins

Publisher's summary

This program includes an introduction read by the author.

From best-selling author of She's Not There, New York Times opinion columnist, and human rights activist Jennifer Finney Boylan, Good Boy: My Life in Seven Dogs, a memoir of the transformative power of loving dogs.

This is a book about dogs: The love we have for them, and the way that love helps us understand the people we have been.

It’s in the love of dogs, and my love for them, that I can best now take the measure of the child I once was, and the bottomless, unfathomable desires that once haunted me.

There are times when it is hard for me to fully remember that love, which was once so fragile, and so fierce. Sometimes it seems to fade before me, like breath on a mirror.

But I remember the dogs.

In her New York Times opinion column, Jennifer Finney Boylan wrote about her relationship with her beloved dog Indigo, and her wise, funny, heartbreaking piece went viral. In Good Boy, Boylan explores what should be the simplest topic in the world, but never is: Finding and giving love.

Good Boy is a universal account of a remarkable story: Showing how a young boy became a middle-aged woman - accompanied at seven crucial moments of growth and transformation by seven memorable dogs. "Everything I know about love," she writes, "I learned from dogs." Their love enables us pull off what seem like impossible feats: To find our way home when we are lost, to live our lives with humor and courage, and above all, to best become our true selves.

©2020 Jennifer Finney Boylan (P)2020 Macmillan Audio

Critic reviews

"Narrator Kelsey Navarro inhabits this memoir by the much loved, though often attacked, transgender writer Jennifer Finney Boylan.... While capable of high theatricality, Navarro here employs the voice of a woman more amused than outraged. Adoration may be mysterious, but Navarro's quiet performance generates that precious nectar, and plenty of it." (AudioFile Magazine)

"They say a dog is man’s best friend...but what about a trans woman? Boylan’s gorgeously crafted homage to our unconditional love of dogs turns out to be much less of a paean to her constant canine companions, and much more of a journey through her own psyche and the moral needle of the world we live in. What do we keep, even as we lose pieces of ourselves? The dog at your feet while you’re reading already knows the answer." (Jodi Picoult, number one New York Times best-selling author of A Spark of Light and Small Great Things)

"Jenny Boylan has given us a story full of humor, earned wisdom, and large doses of unconditional love. Beautifully written, wise, and funny, Good Boy is a gift to us all - but especially the dog lovers." (Jami Attenberg, author of All This Could Be Yours)

Great book 👍

so enjoyable. Jennifer is a great writer. Leaves you thinking of so many meaningful issues. .Also, she is hilarious.

Perfect

Jennifer Boylan just received a new top fan. This piece wonderfully portrays the complexities of discovering your true self as you grow. The learning and growing she shares are universally applicable to trans and cis women alike. I find that beautiful and crucial for all people to recognize. I was brought to tears often. I’m keeping a lookout for the rest of her books.

Love JFB

Been a long time friend of JFB and I think this is one of her best works. Honest and pure.

Probably a good memoir

The narrator’s voice was so irritating and at times robotic that I could not continue to listen. I will probably read the book instead as it is highly rated. This is the first time I’ve run into this with an Audible book. Very disappointing.

I wanted so to like this!

I am a longtime follower and fan of Jennifer Finney Boylan’s writing, so I had no hesitation ordering this up on Audible, and stayed with it because of my appreciation of the author’s other books. But the poignancy of her personal story was lost in her attempt to use her family’s bizarre history with dogs as a structure. Trying to meld those two narratives together felt clunky and I found it hard to keep my head in the story.

Glad Audible was reading for me...

Struggled to finish. Vignettes seemed disjointed and aubergines unfinished, and the dogs felt like an afterthought as a way to tie it all together. I liked the concept, though, and there are some great bits of description.

Poor narrator detracted from this one

As other reviewers have pointed out (and as I therefore knew going in), this is not actually a book about dogs. I was still thinking I could learn something valuable from the author's experience, and I do think that turned out to be the case. But please, memoirists, narrate your own audiobooks. I don't want to hear your life experiences from someone else's lips. I fear the narrator might be responsible for diminishing my enthusiasm for this one. The choppy delivery, flat affect, and odd pauses reminded me at times of a student reading iambic pentameter. I also fear that the narrator might have caused me to miss some of the intended tone. The author professes to love dogs. But the descriptions of most of the dogs in this book are filled with contempt towards the very animals she claims to love unconditionally. It made me wonder if the warmth and love that was supposed to have been conveyed was lost in the narration. There were also lines that I suspected were supposed to be funny, but I wasn't sure because the delivery was so humorless. The writing itself is somewhat discursive, and I found myself a little lost at times. I might try one of the author's earlier memoirs to fill in some of the gaps, especially one that she narrates herself.