Reclaiming My Voice: A New Chapter Begins

It’s been a while since I posted here. Long enough that I owe you an explanation, so here it is.

I stepped back because I was rewriting the book. Not tweaking it, rewriting it. The Dog Story started as something I put together to hand out at speaking engagements, a self-published memoir I never expected much from. It ended up selling over 30,000 copies, mostly one talk at a time, mostly to people who came up to me afterward and said some version of “I needed that.” That’s a strange thing to sit with for a long time. A book that works in someone’s hands after a forty-five minute talk isn’t automatically the book that works on a shelf next to the memoirs you’d actually pick up on your own, the ones that make you miss your subway stop or stay up later than you meant to. I wanted this one to be that book. So I sat down and rebuilt it, chapter by chapter, for almost a year.

I didn’t do it alone. My wife Jocelyn read every chapter, checked every memory against what she actually remembered, and told me flatly when a scene wasn’t earning its place. That mattered more than I expected it to. This is a marriage story as much as it’s anything else, the two of us figuring out, over and over, how to keep showing up for each other when the ground kept shifting under us. Writing it with her checking my work the whole way through turned out to be its own small proof of that.

At its core, it’s the same story it’s always been. Getting my multiple sclerosis (MS) diagnosis at 28. Getting a dog I wasn’t sure I could take care of, at a moment when I wasn’t sure I could take care of much of anything. Fifteen years of watching that dog, Teddy, hold our family together through everything that came after: relapses, surgeries, two kids, the ordinary chaos of a life that kept happening whether I felt ready for it or not.

It’s not a disability memoir in the way that phrase usually gets used, a story about being sick and learning to cope. It’s not really a dog memoir either, not the kind where the dog dies at the end and you spend the last chapter grieving. It’s a book about a life that happened to include MS, the same way it happened to include a crazy dog who jumped out of car windows and took on a German Shepherd twice his size. The MS is real and it’s on every page it needs to be on. It’s just not the point. Teddy is real too, and he’s not the point either, not exactly. The point is the promise I made to him early on, the one I kept even on the days I didn’t want to keep going myself. That’s the actual spine of the book. Everything else, the resilience, the marriage, the fifteen years, hangs off that one promise.

I don’t have a title update for you yet. What I do have is a finished manuscript, for the first time in a long time, and enough distance from it now to know it’s better than what came before. Better sentences. Fewer detours. A version of me on the page who sounds like I actually sounded at each age I’m writing about, instead of one flattened voice narrating the whole thing from a safe distance.

Here’s what this blog actually is. It’s specific true stories. It’s the funny parts left in instead of smoothed out, because that’s how I actually tell a story out loud, and that’s how I want to keep telling them here. It’s the same voice you’ve been reading since 2008, just with better range now. I’ve spent almost twenty years writing about getting knocked down and getting back up. This isn’t a new chapter because I disappeared and came back. It’s a new chapter because the story finally got big enough to match how I’ve always told it, less about one diagnosis, more about an entire life: marriage, kids, work, loss, and the promise that got me through all of it.

If you’ve been here since 2008, thank you for sticking with every version of this blog, including the ones I’d edit differently now. If you’re new, welcome, you picked a good time to show up.

More soon.

Matt