{"product_id":"walking-in-circles-before-lying-down-isbn-9780812975468","title":"Walking in Circles Before Lying Down","description":"Dawn Tarnauer’s life isn’t exactly a success story. Already twice divorced, the young Californian is too busy job-hopping to start a career, her current boyfriend insists on living “off the grid,” her Life Coach sister perpetually interferes with incomprehensible affirmations, her eccentric mother is busy promoting the culmination of her life’s work: The Every Holiday Tree, and her father is ending his brief third marriage while scheduling two dates for the same night. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eDawn’s only source of security and comfort, it seems, is Chuck, a pit-bull mix from the pound. So, when her boyfriend announces that he’s leaving her for another woman, a despairing Dawn turns to Chuck for solace. \u003cbr\u003e“I should have said something sooner,” Chuck confides, as he tries to console her. “Couldn’t you smell her on his pants?” Dawn is stunned. It’s one thing to talk to your pets, but what do you do when they start talking back? It’s not just Chuck, either; she can hear all dogs–and man’s best friend has a lot to say. The ever-enthusiastic Chuck offers his tried-and-true advice on the merits of knocking over garbage and strewing it everywhere, auxiliary competitive peeing etiquette, and the curative powers of tossing a ball. Doubtful of her own sanity, Dawn considers that, in the ways of life and love, it might be better to trust Chuck’s doggie instincts instead of her own. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFilled with sharp wit, biting humor, and canine conversation that would make Doctor Dolittle’s jaw drop, Merrill Markoe’s engaging, cleverly written novel is about the confusing search for love and the divine acts of dog.Emmy Award—winning writer Merrill Markoe has authored three books of humorous essays and the novel I\u003ci\u003et’s My F---ing Birthday\u003c\/i\u003e, as well as co-authoring (with Andy Prieboy) the novel \u003ci\u003eThe Psycho Ex Game\u003c\/i\u003e. She has worked as a radio host and a TV correspondent, and has written for television, movies, and a delightful assortment of publications. She lives in Los Angeles, if you can call that living.Chapter 1\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Remember to Write from Your Unique Perspective\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    I think one of the things that makes me unique is that as far back as    I can remember, I have always talked to a lot of things besides    people. I found it comforting, a way to prove that I existed. From    early childhood on, I was haunted by the feeling that no one could    hear me.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    I was not without my reasons. My mother, Joyce, demanded and usually    got all of whatever attention was available. She was beautiful enough    to have stumbled into an accidental modeling career when she was    seventeen just by waving at a photographer at the beach. Dressed in    her yellow plaid shorts set and a big straw hat, she looked like a    cast member of some seldom seen television show greeting smitten    fans. A few months later, when her picture turned up in hundreds of    inexpensive frames for sale at discount drugstores, it made my mother    a local celebrity. Unfortunately, because she’d signed a release and    accepted fifty dollars, she never received any more money. But once    she realized that people knew who she was, she felt entitled to    dominate any gathering, large or small, whether or not she had    anything to say. I figured out, early on, that getting a word in    edgewise wasn’t going to be in the cards for me. So I became a quiet,    obedient kid, good at blending in, easy to overlook. I learned to    cope with my need for attention by creating my own private personal    rituals to make myself feel special.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    As early as second grade, I’d take the phone into the closet when I    got home from school and call local radio shows so I could dedicate    songs to myself. Then I’d spend hours by the radio, switching from    station to station in the hope that at least one deejay would say, “    ‘You Light Up My Life’ by Debbie Boone goes out to the girl who    lights up everybody’s life, Dawn Tarnauer.” I never did hear anyone    say it, but I kept right on hoping. While I waited, I would pretend    to host my own TV show. For guests I would interview whatever was    available: my plastic horses, my stuffed animals, my mother’s cat, my    chair, my own reflection.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    But The Day Everything Changed was the first time that anything ever    answered me back.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    I was born to the prefeminist version of my mother, a woman with a    constantly lit cigarette and a perpetually jiggling leg, bored out of    her mind but not sure what to do about it. I think she saw her    firstborn much the same way she did her never finished pieces of    découpage: as something that needed more work than she had time for.    By the time I was five, I had figured out that the fastest way to my    mother’s heart was to fetch her cigarettes and tell her everything    was going to be okay.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Halley, my sister, was born when I was six. Sometime during that    pregnancy, my mother turned into a feminist. She dropped her    découpage work (which consisted mainly of hatboxes shellacked with    magazine clippings of female faces that looked like her own) in favor    of something called “creative breakthrough parenting,” where she    learned that she could offset parental neglect through the use of    extravagant praise. I remember not quite trusting all her suddenly    effusive reinforcement, even finding it kind of embarrassing. But it    worked like gangbusters on Halley, who loved hearing that her    preschool drawings were “as good as Matisse” and her one-finger piano    compositions had the precocious brilliance of a grade school    Beethoven. This despite the fact that neither of us really had any    idea who those people were.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Of course, now that Halley and I were both effortlessly producing    masterworks and our careers in the arts were assured, my mother    rationalized that her presence at parent-teacher conferences and    school events would be gilding the lily. This was fine with me. I was    comfortable living under the radar. But it was different for Halley,    who grew up feeling entitled to center stage and wondering why it    seemed to elude her. When she auditioned for the seventh-grade play,    Miracle on 34th Street, and was cast not as the lead but as one of    the two dozen Christmas shoppers, it triggered in her an obsessive    desire for a persona that everyone noticed. Soon she was dying her    curly brown hair blue black, then red, then blond, and then black    with orange streaks. She also started dressing more and more    theatrically, favoring oversize round sunglasses, a dark head scarf,    and a floor-length faux-fur coat—kind of an unintentional homage to    Jackie O at Aristotle’s funeral. But despite her valiant efforts,    Halley never succeeded in gaining the moniker she wanted, which would    have been something as simple as “the mysterious girl dressed in    black.” If the kids remembered to call her anything at all, it was    something less mythic and more direct, like “dork.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    In that way, Halley was a chip off the old block. Because as we got    older, Joyce, our mother, kept searching endlessly, tirelessly, for    her true life’s calling. A new image was usually the first sign that    things were about to change. She bounced from long-haired flamenco    dancer to short-haired Scientology acolyte to buzz-cut-wearing animal-   rights activist who walked picket lines at pet stores, held fund-   raisers for rescue organizations, and chained herself to a five-   hundred-pound Galápagos tortoise at Marine World. There was always    something more pressing for my mother than paying attention to her    daughters. It was clear to us that if we demanded too much of her    time, it would have to be unfairly stolen from condemned animals. By    taking care of ourselves and asking for nothing, we believed we were    helping puppies and kittens stay alive.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    On the surface, Halley and I probably looked like nice if slightly    eccentric girls. Our grades were okay. We weren’t out partying or    doing drugs. But on closer inspection, we had constructed a yin and    yang of defense mechanisms, neurotic tics, and eating disorders.    While I was busy hiding bags of pecan sandies under my bedspread to    make sure I was never more than an arm’s length from sugar, just a    few feet away Halley was diligently dividing a single package of    celery into three days’ worth of meals.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Fortunately, there was a father in residence to help this teeter-   tottering family create some stability: Ted Tarnauer, owner and    general manager of a small but popular vintage car repair. Ted was    very proud of his history as a rockabilly guy from the days of Levi    and the Rockats, a glimpse of which could be gotten by scrutinizing    the triptych of dusty warped black-and-white photos in plastic frames    that hung on the wall by his desk at the shop. Though taken from    below stage level so he appeared to be fifteen feet tall and 50    percent nostril, you could still recognize him: the young Ted, his    big greasy blond hair swooping into his face, his skinny body curled    like a question mark over his guitar, looking handsome and arrogant,    sporting a curled-lip sneer that spoke of meth and moonshine. This    was Dad’s real passion. He put a lot of time into perfecting the    authentic fifties outfits he wore when his band, the Cheaterslicks,    played. Even now he was very pleased when girls under forty got    crushes on him and was proud when they sometimes said he looked like    Brian Setzer. (Though the older ones more often referenced the mature    Conway Twitty, which was also fine, but he liked it less.)\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Ted was quite the talker. It didn’t take much to launch him into a    monologue so impenetrable that his friends worried there might be no    bathroom breaks. Yet despite his retro rocker exterior, by middle age    Dad had morphed into a right-wing neocon who wrote in Pat Buchanan’s    name on ballots where once he had written in Duane Eddy.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e     From early childhood on, Halley and I worshipped our daddy but were    constantly worried that he might leave. We knew he was unhappy. It    was hard to miss, since he had a tendency to break down and weep    after a couple of beers.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    To say nothing of the fact that by the time I was in third grade, I    was finding him asleep on the couch in the morning when I left for    school. The realization that I couldn’t remember when I’d last seen    him in the bedroom with Mom, caused me to lie awake at night,    plotting ways to make him happier. As it turned out, homemade    greeting cards and blueberry muffins weren’t what his life was    missing. He left our home for good when I was ten.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Less than a month after he moved out he announced his intention to    marry a woman from the neighborhood whose car he’d remodeled. It was    unnerving that she looked enough like my mother to be her sister. The    nuptials, which took place a few months after that, were a big    festive event with a meticulous, if somewhat desperate, retro fifties    theme full of hoop skirts, pegged pants, and Jell-O molds. The    Cheaterslicks played. Everybody danced the Lindy hop.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The following day at school, I had my first asthma attack.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e     From that point forward, the only time I could count on seeing my    dad was when each of his new romances imploded. Then he’d reappear    with bribes for us in exchange for helping him pack. “I got some more    cool stuff for you,” he’d say, revealing a box of things he took out    of the cars he got from salvage: pencils, reading glasses, comic    books that were missing a cover, gloves with the fingers stuck    together, bobble-headed Dodgers. “You girls take whatever you want,”    he’d say, “but first do Daddy a favor and stuff those Road and Tracks    into that black gym bag.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    By my late teens, I was tall and blond and tan from swimming,    running, surfing, and riding my bike. I was in good enough shape to    wear a bikini without flinching. Even though my grades were all B’s    and A’s, I was an insecure mess. When I think back to that period, I    see myself as kind of the flip side to the Girl from Ipanema. Because    although I was getting my share of attention from the opposite sex, I    remember a lot more people saying “Jesus Christ, Dawn! Are you nuts?”    than going “Aaaah.” Like when I decided to get married right out of    high school to someone I barely knew, in an unintentional homage to    my parents.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    In keeping with the Tarnauer family tradition, my first husband,    Neil, was domineering, helpless, and prone to spontaneous bursts of    theatrical emotion. Like Dad, Neil was equal parts in love with his    own dramas and the selfless way I offered rapt attention.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    When I met him, I was working the midmorning shift at the Lunch Box    in Simi Valley, the only job I could find when I graduated from high    school. I was feeling anonymous, directionless, and at a loss when    Neil and his big, big plans appeared one day like a door to a world    of limitless possibilities. Neil was fourteen years my senior and    knowledgeable about lots of things: the stock market, the    environment, politics, civil law, filmmaking. We got married at City    Hall a month after we started dating and moved to a two-room    apartment in his hometown of Fresno, where, he claimed, his    connections would work to our advantage.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The plan was for us both to get jobs, pool our money, and produce a    series of documentaries about the deadly fungus endangering the    health of many species of frogs. With Neil’s knowledge and my energy    and support, we were poised to accomplish great things. Right up    until the day Neil got a job tending bar at the Scoreboard, a sports    bar downtown. He quickly became so enamored of his new role as the    local long-haired authority on absolutely everything that he didn’t    even notice when our dreams of glory began to die on the vine.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Without them, it became harder for me to ignore the fact that sex    with Neil reminded me of being in bed with one of those waving    mechanical Santas that department stores put in their Christmas    windows: every move, every word, always the same, and in the exact    same order. This unfortunate set of associations would have been less    distracting if I hadn’t noticed one night that his moans of passion    sounded a lot like “Ho-ho-ho.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    By year three, about the same time I was giving up\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    hope in general, I found a large black-and-white Labrador-   Newfoundland mix, abandoned at the market. He was about eight years    old, the vet thought, and seemed to be in good health. No one knew    why someone had tied him to the shopping cart return and just left    him there. He didn’t bite. He didn’t cry. He didn’t pee in the house.    He was very affectionate. He knew “sit” and “down.” The only other    information available was that he was wearing a red collar from which    hung a small round silver tag that had been engraved with a single    word: Swentzle. Assuming it was his last name, I conducted an    exhaustive search through local phone books for his owner. I even put    up posters featuring his picture under block letters that read,    “FOUND. HEY EVERYBODY! LOOK! IT’S SWENTZLE!!” No one called.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    By the fourth day he was following me everywhere, greeting people no    matter what their circumstances, like some kind of dazed goodwill    ambassador. Just as tickled to meet someone new at the scene of an    accident as he would have been if they climbed in through the window    in the middle of the night, Swentzle was democracy in action. The    most amazing thing was that once Swentzle arrived, life with Neil    seemed to get better. Swentzle distracted me in the best way    possible. Right up until the day that Wayne, the manager of The    Scoreboard, informed Neil that the Sacramento County Department of    Child Support was planning to “assign” 50 percent of his wages after    taxes for child support payments. If I hadn’t walked in on Wayne    explaining the whole thing to him, I still wonder if Neil would have    ever mentioned it to me.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Why didn’t you tell me you were married before?” I gasped. “How    could you forget to mention you had a kid?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Ah, it’s one of those things I’m trying to put behind me,” he said.    “I’ve got my doubts the kid is even mine.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Turned out Neil had never paid a penny of the thousands of dollars in    child support he owed to the mother of a seven-year-old boy in    Sacramento. She had a pretty good case against him, since Neil had    been married to her for six and a half years. I was thunderstruck.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “How many people do you think are going to listen to what we have to    say about endangered frogs once they find out you’re a deadbeat dad?”    I said.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Well . . . I figured once our documentary started raking in the    bucks, I’d, you know, try to pay her something,” he said.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “I thought all the money we made was going toward helping the frogs,”    I said, immediately feeling bad for stiffing some poor underfinanced    little kid.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Neil’s solution was for us to buy a school bus and live on the road    while we figured out how to raise money.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The next day I took my private stash of ones and fives and the    birthday money I’d been wisely hiding in a Tampax box and bought bus    tickets back to L.A. for Swentzle and me. At the time, I was filled    with shame about running away from a marriage, especially one that    everyone warned me wouldn’t work. I hated proving all the naysayers    right. But what never really occurred to me was that I was finally    taking a step toward turning my life around.Author of It's My F---ing Birthday and The Psycho Ex Game [quote]--Boston Sunday Globe","brand":"Villard","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46300422537445,"sku":"NP9780812975468","price":18.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780812975468.jpg?v=1767743564","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/walking-in-circles-before-lying-down-isbn-9780812975468","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}