Okay, so despite the breezy blog posts, I’ve actually been in a state of gut-wrenching anxiety about my forthcoming novel and how it will be received by, well, everybody. Sarah Breivogel, my book’s publicist, sent galleys out to reviewers and magazine editors many weeks ago and then she followed up with emails and letters. The response to my book’s announcement was …nothing. I understood this response to be, not an oversight, not an indication of how beleaguered-by-galleys magazine editors are. No, I knew it for what it was – an astounded, appalled silence. I imagined reviewers staring at the bound galleys in horror, thinking, Denis Leary’s wife tried to write what? A novel? You’ve got to be kidding me! I envisioned them trying to slog their way through the first chapters before finally giving up and writing their one-word review: “Unreadable!” and tossing it into the rubbish bin.

Well, this morning, I finally got a review! And it was nice! It was a starred review from Kirkus reviews! I don’t think I can provide a link because I think you have to be a subscriber to open a link, so you’ll just have to take my word for it. Hmmm, maybe I’m onto something here. I could blog about all sorts of glowing reviews from obscure literary journals that can only be read by subscribers, knowing that my blog readers, most of whom are my own blood relatives, are never going to cough up the dough to open a subscription.

Yesterday, somebody told me that it looks like I’m trying to look like the Dog Whisperer on my website’s homepage. This I took as a compliment because, in fact, I am always trying to be like Cesar Millan, the Dog Whisperer. I wish to emulate him in the same way that some people wish to emulate the Dalai Lama. Anybody who’s a fan of The Dog Whisperer show will understand why. Cesar Millan is a mastermind of canine and human psychological and spiritual healing and I have often thought that he should sell bumper stickers that read WWCD (What Would Cesar Do?)

I think in WWCD terms all the time. Recently I was confronted by a very aggressive man at Stew Leonard’s (it’s a Connecticut grocery store/theme park) who believed that my leaving my shopping cart parked in front of the bagels for two minutes violated all laws of decency.

“Move your f____ing cart,” he barked at me when I wandered back from the cold cuts, and then he actually shoved my cart at me. The man was in what Cesar would call an aggressive/dominant state. In the past I would probably have either joined him in the red zone by cursing angrily back at him, or I would have slunk off with a whining apology and my tail between my legs. But I didn’t do either this time. I did what Cesar Millan would have done. I stood my ground, maintaining calm, assertive energy. I placed my salami in the cart and when the man snapped at me again, I said, suddenly (but still calmly and assertively) “HEY! in a clipped tone – the human version of the “tchhhhh” noise Cesar uses on dogs and the man clammed up and wandered off! If you haven’t seen the show, Netflix an entire season. You really don’t have to be a dog owner to benefit from the teachings of Cesar Millan.

Last year, Denis’s publicist said the Dog Whisperer people were interested in having Denis and our dogs on the show, as they sometimes do segments on celebrity dog owners. Denis loves The Dog Whisper and his first response was “great, I’ll get to meet Cesar Millan,” but I wasn’t so sure he should do it, and this is why: Cesar has a tendency to make men cry about their dogs on his show. Especially men with tough exteriors. I’ve seen it more than once. One minute, a man is chopping wood and talking about his years as a combat Marine, the next minute he’s weeping into the fur of his beloved Cock-a-poo. “I just l-l-ove her soooo much, and I wa-wa-ant her to he happy,” he sobs, and Cesar, in a calm, listening state, nods. He understands. He understands everything.

One recent weekend while Denis and I were watching a Dog Whisperer marathon, I heard a strange croaking sound coming from Denis’s end of the couch. I think it was during the episode about the Yorkie who goes berserk when the vacuum cleaner is turned on. When Cesar told the owner that she was letting the dog down by treating her with “human psychology not dog psychology,” Denis began making these choking, gurgling noises.

“Are you …okay?” I asked.

“What? Yeah, I just have something stuck in my throat,” Denis said, blinking madly. Then after a moment, he whispered, “Life is sometimes just so …unfair,” and he sprang from the couch and ran to the bathroom where he remained for some time.

Our dog Lulu had hip surgery on Thursday. Lulu is young but has terrible hip dysplasia and had a total hip replacement at the Veterinary Referral and Emergency Center in Norwalk, CT. Less than 24 hours after the surgery, Lulu came home. She walked out of the hospital barely limping – which is far better than how she walked in. Dr. Matthew Palmisano, her surgeon, is a great vet and we thank all the kind staff at VREC.

I love Lulu, but it’s a one-sided love because she’s just not that into me. I’ve never had to say that about any dog I’ve shared a home with before. All our dogs have always been totally into me, but not Lulu. I mean, she’s cordial and everything but she doesn’t really care what I do, as long as I don’t keep Denis away from her. She’s Denis’s dog – she’s completely besotted with him.

Denis has spent the winter finishing a book he’s writing called WHY WE SUCK, by Dr. Denis Leary (he has an honorary PhD. Really!) It’s very funny. He has a deadline and he works all day in a barn that has been converted into his office. Lulu spends her days watching Denis play hockey or watching Denis write. When I brought her home from the hospital yesterday, she refused to come into the house, but stared, whining at Denis’s barn. We very carefully walked up to the barn and she was reunited with her master and I managed to photograph her smile.

Not long ago, I had the pleasure of sitting next to Michael Pollan and his lovely wife Judith at a dinner party. Michael is the author of the best-selling books, The Omnivore’s Dilemma and In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto and he is as gracious and engaging a dinner companion as he is a writer. It was one of those affairs in which you are given a choice of a meat or a fish entree – in this instance the choice was Sea Bass or Filet Mignon. I gave the waiter my selection of the Sea Bass but in mid-sentence I cringed at the thought that Michael might think me wildly self-serving by ordering the reportedly endangered Sea Bass instead of the beef. But hadn’t he written that brilliant piece in the New York Times Magazine about what happens to beef from the moment the calf is born until it arrives on our plates? That article put me off beef for some time.

After I ordered, it was Michael’s turn and I realized that I was about to witness the author of the Omnivore’s Dilemma faced with the very dilemma itself. The Sea Bass? Or the Beef? Support the fish by ordering the cruelly raised beef? Or reduce the demand for mass-produced beef by ordering the fish? Michael, I hope, will forgive me for reporting that he ordered the Sea Bass. When I asked him about his choice, he said, “I really don’t like to order beef unless I know where it comes from.”

Now, neither do I.

The very next day, I received a call from Libby Fitzgerald inviting me to visit some new calves. Libby, her husband Terry and their three sons own Greyledge Farm here in Bridgewater, CT, and they raise natural, grass-fed beef cattle. It was calving time and Libby said that I might get to see a calf being born that day. When I arrived in her barn, there were no births in progress but there were several sweet, long-lashed newborns lying beside their doting mothers. The Fitzgerald’s barn is so pristine and the cows are such amiable, welcoming gals that I was almost overcome with the urge to nestle down in the straw with them to swap birth stories.

I waited until I was out of earshot to place my beef order with the farm manager. Denis is a lover of red meat, and the first time I cooked him a Greyledge Farm steak, I’m not kidding, he nearly wept with joy. Natural beef really tastes better than the mass-produced, hormone-pumped stuff. Now when we drive by the Fitgerald’s farm, Denis and the dogs stare out the car window at the grazing cattle and they all drool and whine.

My daughter Devin took these photos the other day. I know it’s already spring in New York City but up here it looks like winter still, except for these few blossoms.

I have been trying to strip our beasts of their winter coats. This is Gabriel:

If you’re wondering why the image of Gabriel is crisp and clear and the image of my face is so blurry that you can barely make out the features of a face, it’s because I photoshopped out all my wrinkles and when that was done, I was barely left with eyes, nose and mouth. Gabriel, though doesn’t need retouching, because he is very handsome, as you can see. I guess I could try to photoshop in a forelock – that little tuft of hair between his ears is all he’s ever had. He has male pattern baldness, poor guy, always has.

Finally figured out how to post photos. Am using this photo of Daphne as a test. She’s one of those dogs that likes to carry things around (part retriever). Unfortunately, the thing she likes to carry is almost as big as she is, so her day-to-day life is sometimes laborious. She makes it that way.

They’ve found another one. It’s been all over the news. They keep showing clips of her standing in front of what seems to be an ordinary suburban home, but when the front door opens, her awful secret is revealed. This sweet, innocent-looking old biddie hasn’t seen fit to throw anything out since the Nixon administration. She’s a hoarder and her grown-up children have ratted her out.

It’s a disease, they say on the morning news, on CNN, on CNBC – a disease that creates chaos for those around the hoarder. How did her life get so out of control? To find out, I’m told, tune into Oprah Winfrey later today. These news spots about hoarders used to be a wake-up call to me and I’d spend the next several days trying to unearth my office from years worth of old manuscripts, bills, Christmas wrapping paper, empty hampster cages, sports bras, Easter baskets, dog bones, waffle irons, saddle pads, and magazines. Oh, and catalogs. Hundreds and hundreds of catalogs. Now, I’m so far gone that when I see a fellow hoarder being carted off, my eyes dart from side to side and my heart races. Is that a car I hear pulling up outside? A news van? Oprah’s limousine? I envision myself being led outside to a waiting team of behavioral psychologists, while men in hazmat suits and gas masks bravely enter my home.

I’m really not as bad as the people who end up on Oprah, but I’m getting there. I have children and sometimes they have friends over. Sometimes these friends have parents who pick them up and stop in to chat. I can’t bear the shame of a filthy home so I do what any sensible person would do. When I learn that somebody is about to arrive at my house, I run around grabbing newspapers off the floors, cable bills out of the sink, dog bones off the sofa, socks and sports bras off the kitchen table, etc., and I toss them into the only downstairs room with a door – my office. Then I close the door. When the person arrives, they see a relatively tidy home. I’ll sort out my office later, I tell myself.

I have sought help. I’ve watched the Oprah episodes, I’ve even watched home-improvement shows devoted to cleaning your home and organizing your life, but the extent to which they try to simplify the whole problem is absurd. The solution, according to the experts, is to throw stuff out. Throw out all the catalogs, more are coming, said some house-organizing fanatic on one of these shows. Right, I think, and never find that set of barbecue tools with the industrial-sized tongs I saw in one of them. I know it was a 2006 catalog but I’m not sure if it was Hammacher Schlemmer or the one with all the gardening stuff. I must have those tongs! I’ll never find them if I throw away the old catalogs.

In two months, my daughter will be getting her driver’s license and in order to do so, she will need to show her birth certificate. Her birth certificate is in the office … someplace, and she’s been pestering me about finding it. So, after watching the morning news and processing the shame-by-association, I decided to just get it over with. I would clean the office. Now, five hours later, although I am not even halfway through, there are five contractor sized garbage bags filled with junk in my front hall, and I have learned the following:

A) I have ADD
B) The accumulated stuff was/is crazily organized by stratum. It’s like an archeological dig. The top layer was all stuff from this month, the next layer last month, dating back to the turn of this century. It occurred to me that I should leave everything just as it is. When I want to find the title for our pick-up truck, for example, I need only to figure out what month and year we bought it, and then I can instantly thumb through the pile until I reach that date, and there it will be.
C) I have really bad ADD.

My friend Wendy sent me this very amusing story. I guess she figures I need a plan B in case this book doesn’t sell. I think I’d be quite good at this actually. It’s hysterical that women do almost all the writing and men do most of the reading of this genre. At least I think that’s what the story said. I was actually sitting in a cabinet, a tiny cabinet awaiting a mammogram when I read this story. At my radiologist’s office, they file the women into adjacent, very narrow dressing cabinets and ask them to change into a gown and then wait quietly with curtains drawn. All the women sit in these cabinets. I don’t know why. So I was reading my emails, snorting with laughter, and then, when I was summoned, I was chastised for having a cell phone on, which I guess is a big no-no in radiologist’s offices. They want you to have NO human contact before mammograms. Maybe they think you are sending out distress signals. HELP, LOCKED IN CABINET. ABOUT TO HAVE BOSOM CLAMPED IN VISE.

No, that’s not a goiter on my neck in the photo on the upper right-hand side of this page. That’s our dog Lulu.

You may be wondering why there are dogs all over my website. The answer is, because we share our home with a very splendid pack of four dogs who like to pose. When I was being photographed for this site, I first tried to pose by myself and I made these frightening, wide-eyed-with-dementia-looking smiling attempts and I suddenly had no idea how to make a smile. It feels incredibly stupid to be standing, grinning at a camera and no matter what Miki the photographer did or said, I couldn’t make a pleasant face. At some point, though, somebody let the dogs out and they joined us. When we resumed the picture-taking, the dogs immediately picked up on the gist of what we were doing and proceeded to sit beside me and strike very regal poses.

Our dogs are mutts, except for the little one who is supposed to be a Chihuhua, but they are very beautiful mutts and they seemed to be under the impression that Miki had come expressly to photograph them. Lulu, the reddish-brown dog, especially, put on her Vogue face – I actually think she was sucking in her cheeks to give the illusion of cheekbones in the shot on my homepage. Daphne, the blond, kept offering her profile, which she seems to think is her best angle. Pongo, our only male dog, is fifteen and deaf and blind and castrated and was no doubt resting his smelly self someplace. Anyway, the only photos that came out of that shoot in which I look semi-normal are the ones where I’m smiling with my dogs, so that’s why they’re all over the site.

Our daughter Devin is a really talented photographer and I’m trying to load some shots she took of the dogs today but I have no idea how to do that and don’t want to bother Nancy, the INCREDIBLY generous and knowledgeable and fun web designer who helped set up this site, because it’s a Sunday. But it occurs to me that the fact that I can’t load the images might be some kind of divine intervention, because I actually don’t love when other bloggers post pictures of their kids and animals. You’ve seen my dogs. I don’t need to keep showing them to you – all y0u people who read and comment on my blogs.

Wait, I just had an idea. I might be able to link to the photos.

Okay, didn’t work.

The night before last I saw a dress rehearsal for The Country Girl, which is certain to be Broadway’s biggest hit this season. It’s directed by Mike Nichols and stars Peter Gallagher, Morgan Freeman and Frances McDormand. The Country Girl is about the wife of an actor and I watched the rehearsal with the wife of one of the actors – my dear friend Paula Harwood Gallagher. Paula has agreed to do a Q&A with me for an upcoming blog in which we will discuss the actor’s wife life.

I’ve never been in a Broadway theater during a rehearsal before and it was quite fun sitting up in the mezzanine, just Paula and me. It’s actually hard to decide where to sit in a grand old theater when you can have any seat you want. Some of the orchestra seats had been covered with large make-shift platforms that held Mr. Nichol’s notebooks and coffee machines but the mezzanine was so empty and eerie that I refused to look around for fear I would see a ghost. Then the curtains opened and I was absolutely riveted. The performances in this play are incredible – order your tickets now. Previews started last night, opening night is April 27th.