Anna Heyward has written for The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Paris Review, Vogue, and more, and studied animal behavior and welfare science at the University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine.
In Living with Freddie: How a Dog Taught Me to Be Human, Heyward writes about adopting Freddie, an Italian greyhound with severe separation anxiety, and how trying to understand his mind transformed the way she saw her own. It’s a moving meditation on the relationship between humans and animals, what we can truly know about another being, and how much we should try to change those we love.
Heyward answered the recurring My Reading Life Q&A so readers could get to know the books that shaped her life and influenced her book.
What was the first book you were obsessed with as a child?
Probably an illustrated copy of The Hobbit that my siblings and I would fight over. There were long negotiations over who would get to read it and on which day. I remember the same problem cropping up over a box set of Sherlock Holmes, too. We ended up keeping it in the hallway between my room and my brother’s room. A compromise.
I’m sure some of those obsessions were at least a little bit transitive in nature: My older brother loved those books, so I did, too. However it came about, I still enjoy those books today. I re-read the complete Sherlock novels every ten years or so. Some of them still frighten me when the opening mystery is presented.
What book helped you through puberty?
This is a draw between My Brilliant Career and Wuthering Heights. A dead heat! For both, I think it was the voice. Each story is told by such a distinct, complete person.
What book do you wish 16-year-old you had read?
Well, while writing this book, I wish I had read more science textbooks more closely. Or, maybe this would have worked better: I wish I had read some narrative prose that had helped me understand why I should care about the information in science textbooks. A book by someone like Robin Wall Kimmerer or David Quammen or Thor Hansen could have gotten through to me perhaps. Would have been helpful to have read Gerard Manley Hopkins or G. K. Chesterton earlier, too.
If you were to teach a class on Damn Good Writing, what books would make the Syllabus?
Various translations of Anton Chekhov. Mary Gaitskill. Penelope Fitzgerald. Patricia Highsmith. I don’t know if you’re allowed to have it on a prose syllabus, but to properly study Good Writing you probably need to study poetry. The very best writing is probably poetry. You can “use” it even if you have no intention of ever writing a poem.
What books helped guide you while writing your book?
The Gate of Angels, which I couldn’t help but discuss right there in the book. This short, compact, deft novel feels very easy and digestible but it’s actually very dense and complex without appearing to be so. On the surface it’s a historical novel and an eccentric love story, but it’s really about science, metaphysics, and the ability to believe in things that can’t be directly observed.
Many characters in the book are material scientists who are on the verge of proving the existence of the atom and, eventually, how to split it. They can’t yet see it, but they think it’s there. Fred, our main character is a serious young man in a physics fellowship, and he’s determined to believe only in observable, material reality that can be proven by the scientific method, but he’s surrounded by people, including older scientists, who choose to believe in divine and supernatural things, like ghost stories or religious teachings.
Fitzgerald has the lightest touch, but the way she presents the spasmodic methods we use to arrive at the things we believe in is very moving. And it was helpful to me in thinking through some of the cognitive dissonance that occurs in human-animal interactions.
What books are on your nightstand now?
We have been living in a half-renovated house for a while and we haven’t gotten around to getting bedside tables yet, but in the messy pile on the floor on my side of the bed there’s a textbook called Asking Animals, about behavior testing and measuring techniques; a book called Rethinking Rescue, by Carol Mithers; various beekeeping books; and a collection by Tobias Wolff.