John Grogan Likes It Ruff

On a Tuesday on the cusp of the New Year, a cloud of existential angst drifted over the newsroom at the Philadelphia Inquirer. Two­thousand-five had already been a discouraging year for the Inq-stained wretches at 400 North Broad, what with the buyouts and the rumors of the sale and the fricking blogs — they don’t even care about accuracy, you know — all of the things that contributed to the constant, hovering threat of oblivion at the paper,even though we make plenty of money goddammit, although it couldn’t ever be enough to suit those greedy Wall Street creeps. Now, on top of everything, insult heaped onto injury.

Because there it was — on the New York Times best-seller list:

1. Frank McCourt

2. Jimmy Carter

3. Doris Kearns Goodwin

4. John Grogan

5. Thomas Friedman


But wait — that isn’t exactly right.

“I found out last night that I’m moving up to number three,” John Grogan, the Inquirer’s suburban columnist, e-mailed me the following day, when it was announced that his first book, Marley & Me: Love and Life With the World’s Worst Dog, had ascended another notch on the list.

“Jimmy Carter dropped,” he noted.

John Grogan has been at the Inquirer for just over three years now, and during that time, many of his colleagues have not particularly taken to his columns, which veer from screeds on crime and municipal issues to stories from his rather innocuous suburban life. “I always thought it was kind of, you know, cutesy-poo,” confided one Inquirer reporter, a week after Grogan wondered in print whether a group of lawyers had beamed in “from Planet Goof.”

Thus the success of the book, partially based on a series of columns Grogan wrote about his Labrador retriever, Marley, took many Inquirer staffers by surprise. It’s reasonable that a “dog book” would do well — dog lovers are known to be passionate consumers of pet-related products — but this well? A book about a freaking dog and all of a sudden this guy’s rubbing shoulders with three Pulitzer prize-winners and a former American president? And don’t even mention that this is the closest an Inquirer writer has come to a Pulitzer in years.

“We’re all like, why? How did this happen?” another reporter wailed.

Of course, they know the answer is immediate and obvious: Put a picture of a cute puppy on the cover and They Will Come. What’s painful to admit is that there’s more to it than that: Ironically, the things that annoy them about Grogan’s column are the things that have helped make Marley & Me so successful.


Maybe it’s because it’s almost Christmas when I meet him, but John Grogan reminds me of one of Santa’s elves: upright carriage, bright eyes, pointy graying beard, pompous in a way that’s vaguely ridiculous.

“I’m pretty jazzed,” he says of his sudden, and unnerving, success. Grogan, 48, says stuff like “jazzed”; he peppers his sentences with words like “gosh” and refers to his “Hollywood agent” as someone who works with “Michael Orbitz.” This fuddiness is indicative of either his Michigan upbringing, or his time spent among seniors in South Florida, where he was a columnist for the Sun-Sentinel for six years before he was lured to Pennsylvania in 1999 to be editor of Rodale’s Organic Gardening magazine. There, two years in, he was mired in compost — and miserable. “If you think of creativity like an ember, the ember inside of me was just about out,” he says. “I needed to get to a place where I could stoke my fires again.”

We’re having a beer at the Great American Pub in Conshohocken, a couple of blocks from the Inky’s suburban office, which then-editor Walker Lundy fleshed out with staff in 2002 in order to broaden the paper’s appeal to readers outside the city. A friend had told Grogan about the Inquirer job. Unlike his best-known predecessor, the feisty and beloved metro columnist Steve Lopez, Grogan didn’t seem like the sort who would act comically lost every time he took an exit off 476. “John’s a suburbanite himself,” says Virginia Smith, the Inky’s Pennsylvania editor at the time, who hired him. “He was familiar with the lifestyle, and he was passionate about issues, but he could also write these funny stories about being married with three kids and his dog. He had a very wide appeal.”

Grogan’s “charge from above” in his thrice-weekly column, he says, is to connect to suburban readers in Bucks, Chester, Delaware and Montgomery counties, and though he lives outside Allentown, he says he “parachutes into” these areas for column fodder. But the truth is that unlike Lopez or Pete Dexter, the legendary Daily News columnist, he doesn’t do a ton of original reporting. Most of his columns sound off on issues that are already in the news — stuff like Terri Schiavo and intelligent design and the pay raises Harrisburg legislators gave themselves. Like other things with wide appeal, such as, say, Taco Bell, Grogan’s column isn’t necessarily quality stuff, but it gets the job done and can even seem pretty good. He can string a sentence together and has a knack for observing the minutiae of everyday life, though unlike many city columnists he’s not particularly challenging. He doesn’t make his readers think so much as tell them what they already think.

For instance, from the Grogan canon:

Murderers = Bad, especially men who murder women and children (12/20/05).

Overpriced hamburgers = Outrageous (1/17/06).

Puppies = Man’s best friend, but it’s sad when they die (1/6/04, ongoing).

It’s a style that has prompted some colleagues to refer to him as “Captain Obvious.”

And yet …

“One of the things I hear most often from readers is, ‘You articulated exactly what I was thinking,’” says Grogan. It’s tough to get hard numbers on who reads a column, and the question of who exactly reads his, when put to Grogan bluntly, understandably provokes a glare. But unofficial polling suggests his musings are pretty popular. Barnes and Noble in Willow Grove, for instance, attributes the large crowds that showed up at Marley events to column readers.

The series of columns Grogan did about Marley, his ill-behaved but adorable Lab, which he started back at the Sun-Sentinel, were especially well-received, a fact Grogan seems baffled by even now. “I try to write about important topics like children in distress,” he says, “but then I’d write about Marley and I’d get five times the mail. People seem to respond more to topics that deeply affect their lives.”

He is a tiny bit uncomfortable with this. Grogan would like to be more of newshound, more Thomas Friedmanesque. Once, in Florida, he went to a high school and quizzed students on current events, and subsequently wrote a column about the deplorable state of education. But when the final Marley column, “Saying farewell to a faithful pal,” ran in the Inquirer last January, he was overwhelmed with mail: “I think I came in to about 800
e-mails. My voicemail was full. I thought, ‘Hey, I really may be onto something here.’”

Captain Obvious wasn’t really onto something new. Two years earlier, Publishers Weekly, citing books like Amazing Gracie, about a deaf, anorexic Great Dane, said, “Memoirs of living with a beloved canine companion … [seem] to be a definite growth industry in publishing.”

Marley wasn’t deaf or anorexic; he was just a Labrador retriever, although Labs also have wide appeal: They’re the most popular dog in the U.S., in fact. Grogan wrote the book in nine months, using his wacky dog as a backbone for, he says, “a tale of a family that’s starting out and growing into something.”

Marley & Me, a slim volume, is a big, fat Gordita of a book. It is easily devoured and utterly pleasurable. It is also sad, sad, sad, like a canine Love Story. What can you say about an 11-year-old dog who died? That he was cute, but bad. That he loved chewing, and drooling, and pulling on his leash. And me.

He sold the manuscript for $200,000. As of this writing, there are 1,070,000 copies in circulation. When his royalty check comes in April, publishing insiders estimate it will be close to $2 million. And he recently sold the movie rights to the producer of Dude, Where’s My Car? for, he told the Inquirer, “a substantial sum.” As of now, not much has changed in his life, although he’s thinking of taking a leave of absence from the column to work on his next book, a story about his youth and his relationship with his father. And he notes he’s switched from Yuengling to Heineken.

Back at the Great American Pub, Grogan takes a call from his editor, who tells him that Marley & Me will be moving up another notch on next week’s New York Times list.

“Who dropped? Did Friedman drop?”

Friedman dropped.


When Walker Lundy reorganized the Inquirer newsroom, knocking out a political column, combining the foreign and national desks, and reappropriating staff to the suburbs, it was, he said, making the paper “more accessible” to readers there, where close to 68 percent of the readership lies. Those readers wanted more service, he said, and fun graphics. Less politics, and more stories about their Neighbors. They had, as Virginia Smith says, a “lifestyle” that needed to be catered to.

The Grogans know something about that lifestyle. Their home outside Emmaus is a warm and cozy two-level, with a two-car garage, a rec room containing a ping-pong table, and an adjacent “guy room,” complete with woodworking studio and “beer fridge.” On a weekday afternoon, the house is teeming with kids — their three, plus some extras. Gracie, their 18-month-old Lab, seems like more than one dog, running around in circles, jumping, barking. “And she’s the good one,” Grogan sighs, with the comic-­exasperated air of Wilbur in Mister Ed.

“Did Patrick do his homework?” his wife, Jenny Vogt, asks, coming in from picking up their daughter at elementary school. “I think so?” he says jokingly. She rolls her eyes. “Jenny wears the pants,” he says, just like Wilbur would.

Grogan doesn’t think ’50s sitcoms are analogous to his family life, but personally, that’s the only place I’ve ever heard a father give anything like the “Life is like a sailboat talk” that Grogan gave his son Patrick recently after Patrick brought home disappointing grades. A good sailor picks a clear destination on the far shore and sticks to it, Grogan wrote in a column about the episode. No matter what weather kicks up, what obstacles and detours arise, he doesn’t lose sight of his goal. And anyway, Grogan is wearing a cardigan.

“We’re just sort of a typical family,” he says. As he folds peacefully onto his leather couch, I think that this is why his colleagues and certain magazine writers see his Inquirer column as such a total eye-roller. A city columnist shouldn’t be typical: He should be someone you live vicariously through — someone who crashes parties and talks smack and passionately opposes the smoking ban, not someone who, like you, is sitting on a couch from (probably) Jennifer Convertibles, who doesn’t even know that $15 hamburgers hit Center City three years ago.

But in Marley & Me, typicality is the ace card. It’s what has kept the book moving up the list and into the homes of even non-dog-owners. The people buying the book see not just their dogs in the book, but themselves. In plays and movies and books, suburban life is usually imbued with dark meaning. Like in American Beauty, or Desperate Housewives — there must be something going on there, it’s just too perfect! But the fact is, most suburban families don’t have a dark underbelly. Most of them are like the Grogans. Or want to be a little more like the Grogans.

The owners of Marley may have a bad dog, but they have what seems like an ideal life. In the book, they are always sharing embraces and bathed in “dappling” sun. A trip to Disney World goes off without a hitch. When something serious happens, like when Jenny gets postpartum depression, it doesn’t stop the world. It’s something they get through, as a family, with the help of their big goof of a dog. They find fulfillment in a house full of children, in “spilled applesauce and noseprints on the windows and the soft symphony of bare feet padding down the hall.”

This kind of explains why Grogan has been hearing from a lot of young women who, he says, “are newly engaged or in the early years of marriage, who are going through all of those sorts of things couples are going through.”

Marley & Me is not just aspirational, it’s inspirational. “Marley taught me about living each day with unbridled exuberance and joy, about seizing the moment and following your heart. He taught me to appreciate the simple things — a walk in the woods, a fresh snowfall, a nap in a shaft of winter sunlight.”

“Sales reps are calling it Tuesdays With Marley,” says Seale Ballenger, Grogan’s publicist at HarperCollins, and though Grogan winces when he hears that nickname, it’s apt: Morrie, like Marley, was a best-selling juggernaut by a newspaper columnist, a nonfiction memoir with a self-help sheen, and self-help, like service, is extremely popular. Some years ago, the New York Times had to put self-help on a separate list, because it beat out the other nonfiction every time.

Walker Lundy, who is now retired and living in North Carolina, isn’t surprised at John Grogan’s success: “If you can strike a universal chord among human beings,” he says, “then you have a winner.”

A few weeks after I visit Grogan’s house, his publicist e-mails to say Marley and Me is taking the number one slot on lists across the country. Carter, Kearns Goodwin and McCourt have all been banished, through Friedman hangs on at number two.

Walker Lundy may have been roundly criticized for turning the Inquirer from a hard-news Center City daily to a suburban shopper, but everyone always knew he was right. Americans — maybe just human beings — will always be more interested in the people in their own backyards, the people who are more like them, than in the people in foreign countries. People who have everything will still be looking for something in the self-help aisle, and Taco Bell will always win over Mexican food.

It’s not so much of a shock, really, that John Grogan is on the best-seller list. What’s surprising is that Thomas Friedman still is.

E-mail: jpressler@phillymag.com