There is something jarring about reading a memoir where the pandemic appears as backstory. A few lines in, the narrator references lockdown as a turning point, and for a moment the whole thing stutters. It feels like it was just six months ago. It was also, in some ways, a lifetime ago. The whiplash of that is its own thing to sit with, and Isabel Klee’s debut memoir arrives right in the middle of it. Dogs, Boys, and Other Things I’ve Cried About is a book about her twenties in New York City, about rescue dogs and complicated men and the long, slow work of figuring out why you keep making the same choices. It is warm and relatable, and it made me cry on several occassions, so proceed accordingly.
Klee built her following, nearly two million people across TikTok and Instagram, through her account @SimonSits, documenting the foster dogs she takes in through Muddy Paws Rescue in Brooklyn. Her practice is deliberate: she consistently chooses the hardest cases, the most frightened, the least adoptable, the ones most at risk of being passed over, and she works to give each one a story that helps the right family find them. The book is built around a handful of those dogs (she’s fostered 36 to date) , their arrivals and their particular kinds of damage and the small moments where something shifts. Anyone who follows her online will know the broad shape of it. The book gets underneath it.
The chapter on Poutine, a dog she nursed back from a deeply compromised state, is the one that stayed with me longest. Klee is not sentimental about what she does, which is part of what makes the emotional weight of it land so hard. She sees clearly that an animal can suffer, that someone made a choice to let that happen, and she meets it with a practicality that somehow makes the tenderness more visible, not less. It is an uncomfortable chapter.
Running alongside the dog stories is the other thread: the men. Klee is honest about her patterns in a way that takes was probably hard to be honest about. It takes her a while to understand why she keeps making certain choices, which relationships she gravitates toward, and which ones she stays in too long. The self-reflection is not tidy, and relies on the support of a good therapist. She doesn’t arrive at a clean epiphany and reorient herself. She circles, backtracks, makes the same mistakes. Most of us have a version of that chapter in our own lives, the one where you can only see the pattern in retrospect.
What makes the book work is that Klee doesn’t let the dogs and the boys operate as separate tracks. The dogs are not a metaphor, exactly, but they are doing real structural work for the narrative. The care she gives the most frightened pups, the patience she extends to creatures who have no reason to trust her yet, runs in quiet counterpoint to the relationships where she offered far less to herself. That gap is what the book is really about.
If you liked:
- Everything I Know About Love by Dolly Alderton
- I Am, I Am, I Am by Maggie O’Farrell
- How Do We Know We’re Doing It Right: & Other Essays on Modern Life by Pandora Sykes