Media: John Grogan Likes It Ruff

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