John Grogan spent over 20 years as an investigative journalist and columnist, most recently with The Philadelphia Inquirer. His first book, Marley and Me, was a New York Times bestseller with six million copies sold and has since been translated into over 30 languages. It was also transformed into a Hollywood film starring Owen Wilson and Jennifer Aniston.

John has recently been at residence at Trinity College Dublin, giving a mixture of lectures, talks and workshops. Third-year English literature student and TN2 Deputy Editor, Simon Jewell, caught up with John to discuss all things literature, his love of labradors, his writing process and how it felt to see his life transformed into a best-selling novel and film.  ▷

Could you describe your writing process – how you brainstorm and prepare? And does it differ for the medium you are writing in?
Usually, by the time I come to a piece, I’ve given it quite a bit of thought. I’ll often write an essay about it, or magazine piece, or newspaper column. Marley and Me started as a newspaper column I wrote for The Philadelphia Inquirer, where I was working at the time. You know, I wasn’t thinking about a book yet, but that column was sort of crystalised, I was basically writing a book proposal, and it told the whole story in 600 words. That helps me, it’s kinda like writing an outline. I’m fairly disciplined once I start.

Do you find that having journals for non-fiction helps with the thought process?

Yeah. In the talks that I’m going to give the students here, I will be fiercely advocating for journaling and journals. I’ve been doing it since I was a high-school student, it’s really prudently valuable. The two books i’ve written, I’m not sure I’d have either of those books without my journals. The first thing I did was go back to those periods. I used to write them by hand, but early when I was in my 20’s I moved to a word processor, this is before the internet!

So when I went to write Marley and Me, I knew it would begin in January 1991, that’s when we brought him home. I just went back to my 1991 journals and pulled them out and then I had 13 years of journals. Many of the scenes in the book I wrote as journal entries, within hours of them happening. So they were completely fresh and raw, I wasn’t trying to be writerly, I was just trying to get things down. Not only did it help me to process these memories, but it also guided me to things that I may have completely overlooked for the book.

You wrote a lot of columns and reports for The Philadelphia Enquirer, which was a daily/weekly process. With book writing, it may take two or three years before you get any form of feedback. Do you miss the immediacy of journalism?

I do miss daily journalism. I would write three columns a week, the next morning I would open my email and get a good idea, pretty quickly of how I hit. I’d get this feedback, sometimes, I’d only get six or seven responses and sometimes I would get 200. When I wrote about Marley in that column I got 800, it was one of my biggest responses if not the biggest I’ve ever gotten. So that kind of relationship with readers on a three times a week basis is extremely powerful.

That was a huge acclimation for me, when I stuffed back out of newspapers, just stepping back into to the silence of yourself and your home office and a computer screen and silence. Like as you said, for two or three years, it’s a difficult thing when you have been weaned on that day to day reaction you get. I had to have that column in and it had to be exactly 635 words. Those deadlines forced you as a writer to say it’s got to be good enough, you’ve got to do it. The problem we have as writers is we are our own worst critics and we always feel it could be better. We always want one more run at it, I’m gonna sleep on it and I’m gonna try tomorrow, then tomorrow it looks even worse. The next thing you know weeks and months could go by and daily journalism did not afford that luxury.

Do you think that strict routine helped or hindered your freedom when it came to writing non-fiction?
I think my journalism background definitely helped me in major ways. I think everybody has their own ways of writing a book and there are many different ways to come at it. For me, I used the structure of my journalism that I started in high school, working in student papers and all through college, then one week after I got out of college, I started a newspaper. The deadlines, the structure, the discipline, the need to be accurate, the need to check facts and double check, all these little details give you the concrete structure that helps form whatever creative product you hope to form.

You’ve honed a career on writing non-fiction, do you have any aspirations to write a novel?
Uhm, yes… Although I don’t know if I’ll ever do it! I’ve been working off and on for several years on a piece of fiction that may just be destined to stay in my desk drawer. I don’t know that yet, but they are different skills, at least for me they are. My whole being, grew up on non-fiction writing and that’s my comfort zone. Reporting on my own life, even though I write my books which have been about aspects of my life, that didn’t mean I didn’t need to report them. I’d go back and dig up things, dig out old records, my old report cards from school anything that would help illuminate a part of my life that had shadows and of course journals. So yeah, I think non-fiction is part of my DNA.

So get out, live life, take some chances and when you get an opportunity to sit quietly at a bus or engage the person next to you and see what this person is like, take that chance.

What advice would you share with any aspiring writers?
When I talk with the students I teach, I’ve coined the term ‘the writing trinity.’ Which is to read a lot, because you can’t be a good writer if you don’t read and model yourself on successful writers. You need to read, as in everyday, whether it’s journals or blog posts, you just gotta do it. It’s like I often say, it’s like shooting baskets, if you’re gonna make those three-point shots, you gotta shoot a lot of baskets. The last element is to live. You’ve got to live a life and not stay in a sheltered existence or try to be a writer of great topics when you haven’t experienced life. So get out, live life, take some chances and when you get an opportunity to sit quietly at a bus or engage the person next to you and see what this person is like, take that chance.

I have to ask you about Marley and Me… What was it like, having something so deeply personal turned into a best selling book and then a major blockbuster film. How did you process that whole experience?

In slow motion. [Laugh.] Yeah, I mean it was a little bit of an out of body experience. It comes in stages. I wrote a book that I really believed in, I believed I had a story worth telling. I knew that there was some emotional heft to it and it wasn’t just about a dog story. It was really a story about a young couple growing up and figuring out what’s important in life. Which is a pretty universal thing.

So I thought, maybe 5,000 people will read this book and I’ll be darn happy with that! Just think, 5,000 people, that’s a lot of people! Then it sold pretty easily, then it jumped on the New York Times Best Seller List in its first week and it climbed and climbed and then after three months, it hit number one on all the best selling lists. There were incremental states of disbelief and sort of pinching myself. Then I got a call from 20th Century Fox and that was sort of the biggest “Is this really happening to me?” I’m just this ordinary guy, married, dad of three kids, living in small-town Pennsylvania. So yeah, to then watch your book, which is not just my book but a book about my wife, my children and their names, go out of your hands and into the hands of scriptwriters who then interpret it for the screen, it was a little frightening.

A lot of authors tell these horror stories of how these screenwriters killed their books and it was a travesty and I can’t really say that, I think they captured it quite well. They had to take some liberties, but they were respectful I thought, they were respectful to the emotional truths of the story. For anyone who wants to know how close to the movie was, all you gotta do is read the book. The book is as honest as I could be, true version of what happened. The movie has variations but it’s pretty close.

I’d also say, as a writer, no matter how many books you sell and you think that you got such saturation with books published in 30 languages, it’s nothing in comparison to what a single movie will do. There are so many people who don’t read but go to movies. Even when you’re selling a lot of books, you’re selling in this small part of the triangle for people who actually read for pleasure, or people who read for work or some who don’t read much at all. But everyone goes to the movies, so it was a whole other scale. It went viral. If you could figure out how to do that, everyone would be a millionaire, right? It just happens sometimes and it happened to me.

So as the author, did you have any input into the vision of the film? Did you go on set at all?
Yeah, I was on set. Contractually I was a consult on the script, I could see the various versions, I could mark things off and they would look at my mark-offs, but I had no veto power. I sold the full rights, which is pretty standard. I got to see the scripts and could help shape them in some way. There were things they had to change and I could see why they changed them, then there were things that they wanted to change that there was no good reason, like a person’s name and they would change it back. But it was a lot of fun to see people on set, people playing you.

Was it weird to see Owen Wilson play you in the movie? I guess everyone dreams of who will play them in a movie of their life, was it a surprise to see him cast?

I would have never really thought to cast Owen as me, but I think he did a really good job actually. We don’t think we look alike, of course. He’s from Texas and I’m from Michigan and so they are very different parts of the country but there’s this oddly similar speaking pattern between the two. He listened to me as well and he met me and we would talk. I think he’s a very nuanced actor and, of course, Jennifer Aniston played my wife, Jenny, and they’re both lovely and they were great.

So you’ve had labradors since Marley, right? Is there something about labradors that you really like?
Yeah, we do! I guess we like them because they are eternally happy, they love people; sometimes to their own detriment! We have two labs now who are beautifully calm, sedate dogs. So we have all the benefits of the lab without the high energy.

Do you have a favourite book, or specifically a favourite author?
I have a lot of favourite books! I would say a formative book would probably be Catcher in the Rye by J.D Salinger. I read that in high school, then again in college and then in my 20’s and each time I took something different from it. Most of my formation came from mid-20th-century American authors, so Steinbeck, Fitzgerald and Hemingway, Faulkner, the southern writers, this really formed my sense of what storytelling should be. Hemingway, in particular, I sort of idolised.

Hemingway is a controversial choice! He’s definitely a love or hate kind of writer.
My wife hates him! He can be very misogynistic in hindsight! But as a young man, I loved the clarity he could find and simple declarative sentences. As all young writers, I went through the copycat phase where I’d read A Farewell To Arms and then the next piece I’d write would be these three-word sentences and then I’d read a Faulkner short story and I’d be writing 100-word sentences. It’s just part of growing up as a writer and modelling. I always want to see young writers reading, because the modelling is important.

What for you is the hardest process of writing?
Hemingway said: “Writing is easy, all you have to do is sweat blood through your pores.” [Laugh.] That kind of gets to it. The thing about writing is when it’s good, it looks easy to the reader but of course, anyone who has ever tried to do that realises that it’s not! There is some sort of magical, mysterious alchemy that’s going on. When it’s working you don’t know how it’s working but it does, but when it freezes up you don’t know why it’s not working but you don’t know how to fix it. All writers are neurotic, we’re all insecure, we want to be stroked but underneath it all we are very insecure. So navigating that, the psychology of writing, the rejection, that great fear of being mediocre. There are techniques to prevent writer’s block which we talk about in our workshops and I’ll talk about while I’m here.

Telling the story of Marley and Me must have been quite a cathartic process for you to write about these experiences. That idea of mixing the humour with something that is so powerful can be quite a hard thing to do. In Irish writing it can be quite intrinsically linked, do you find it a hard process to blend the two?

Actually, I found that aspect quite natural to me. I was just following the rhythm of natural events. In any life, there are ups and downs and so I just let myself flow on that river. I knew there was some gold in these funny stories with his reputation of “the world’s worst dog.” I knew I had something, but I didn’t have the full story. But it was only after he died that I realised the full arc of the story. I knew when I wrote the book that it would have an end that would be emotionally heavy, but I also had this whole string of comical anecdotes that were true. It was a natural flow as I knew where I was going with it. When you study literature from an academic sense, you see that those peaks and valleys are an important part of the process.

So are you working on anything at the moment?
That’s a complicated question! [Laugh.] I think all writers are working on something. I’m not working on something immediate that has a publication date. As I told you earlier, I’ve been working for quite some time on a novel that’s a work in process and also a continuation of my non-fiction, mining things that I’ve come across in my life. ■

This interview was made possible due to the tireless work of Deirdre Madden of the Oscar Wilde Creative Writing Centre, Diane Sadler, Executive Officer for TCD Fresher students, and Literary Arts Officer, Rosie Lavan. I would like to thank each of you personally for the opportunity and for your resolute work in organising, advising and orchestrating this interview. Lastly, I would like to thank John Grogan for taking the time to interview with me and for his warmth and compassion in sharing his insight and stories. This interview was also conducted in association with The Quill, the School of English newsletter.