When I wrote The Good, Good Pig, it was the hardest book I’d ever written. I mean, for other books I’ve gotten dengue fever and laid in some cockroach-infested hut, and been hunted by tigers and bitten by a vampire bat and all these things. But writing about someone who I’d loved and lost was miserable. Every day I was miserable.
I didn’t want to write at all. I had to, though. Because when Christopher Hogwood died, it was a headline news. It was the lead story in our local paper. It was the lead story in the Metro section of the Concord Monitor, Concord, New Hampshire, our state capital. The outpouring of love from all the friends, literally around the world, convinced me I had to write his story.
And I had to put my story in, too. I didn’t want to do that either. But my literary agent, my wonderful editors, they encouraged me to do that. They told me, you know, your life is like the setting in which the gem that is Christopher will shine. So, The Good, Good Pig is a book about family. And not just the family to whom you’re genetically related, because my family included someone with a flexible nose-disc and a curly tail.
You know, my family included dogs and the children next door, who were not my kids, but they were certainly part of my family. Families are made out of love. They’re not made out of genes, they’re not made out of blood. And that’s what that book said. Writing it was like walking on ground glass, every single day. It was a chronicle of everything I’d lost. But I’m so grateful I wrote it, because now, it has healed me of that loss.
And now, I’ve heard from so many people who have lost someone they loved, or whose biological families weren’t quite what they always wanted. People who’ve been rejected by people they love, but accepted by animals. So many folks, they are now part of my family. And Christopher had this great knack. He used to let himself out of his pen. He was a genius. We would close it with bungee cords and all kinds of locks and things, and he would get out, he would go visit people.
It wasn’t that he didn’t like his pen, it was just that he liked to visit people. And he made friends everywhere he went. And now that he is out of body, he’s now in all these different languages. He’s now around the world, and he’s still bringing me friends. He’s still bringing me blessings. Being dead hasn’t slowed him down one bit.
