Non-Fiction

Kate Spicer in conversation with Julia Wheeler

As any dog lover knows, a whole other culture awaits when you step out with your new walking companion. For many of us it begins and ends with affable chats in the park as our noble hounds sniff each other’s bums and spin figures of eight around our ankles. For Kate Spicer, however, author of Lost Dog: A Love Story, her lurcher was her salvation.

“I was in a coffee shop, extraordinarily hungover, which was not unusual for me at that time, when I saw a friend with a dog. I had a transformative moment and decided that I needed a dog. I acquired this shaggy, ugly, scrawny, strange-looking, third-hand lurcher, who I called Wolfy. He turned out to be both my rehab and my muse.”

Kate’s ‘dodgy habits’ had marked her life since she was a teenager. As she says,

“a lot of people in cities survive, living what my grandmother would have called a rackety life, and still sustaining some semblance of a job and a social life. When you’re a functioning addict, why ever give up? You never really have your rock bottom.”

One day, as she recounts in the opening chapter of what Lockdown Litfest interviewer Julia Wheeler describes as ‘a love story, a memoir, a commentary on 21st century life and at times an absolute page-turner,’ Kate found herself in her drug dealer’s flat, thinking, ‘God, when is this going to end?’

Enter Wolfy, who instilled routine and order into her life, introduced her back into nature, and

“reacquainted me with deep unconditional love. He’s an incredible beast, he just walks at my side silently. Like Philip Pullman’s daemon, he’s an expression of my soul, in a shaggy, smelly, four-footed form.”

Kate’s interview takes us from her home of over 30 years, Notting Hill, a place of ‘dazzling privilege’ as well as ‘profoundly complex and rich community,’ via the Ladies who Lurch and her walks on Wormwood Scrubs, to her desperation at losing Wolfy and her trepidation at writing a memoir (‘there’s a lot of dull, shelf-filling nonsense, and I didn’t want to be one of those people’).

The best literary festivals break down the barriers between ‘them’ and ‘us’, with writers sharing their fears and processes. Kate reveals that thoughts of, ’why is this book worth writing?’ made the process ‘painful and slow.

"I had a breakthrough moment when I realised I had to tell the truth. I rewrote that first chapter and I didn’t flinch from writing about drugs, and then the book took on a life of its own. That’s what you’re waiting for with any creative project. You have to do the work, but you have flow, you’re on your path.

What was harder to write about were elements of shame, being in debt, jealousy of friends with money. What I left out was sex and I didn’t go too deeply into my family background. I stripped it down to the bare essentials so the reader would understand who this character, me, was. Beyond that it would have been indulgent and self-pitying. I’m 50 years old, I don’t feel like a victim any more so I didn’t want to come across like a victim.”

As to the success of #FindWolfy, which trended on social media ‘in a soap opera way’ during the nine heartbreaking days of his disappearance, Kate is cagey. You are, of course, invited to buy the book to find out.

By Sue Carpenter

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