Author of the week: Andrew O’Hagan

last updated 8 January 2015

Novelist Andrew O’Hagan was so obsessed with capturing a dog’s perspective in his latest novel that it “nearly got him into trouble with police in California,” said Elaine Lies in Reuters. The Booker Prize–nominated author wasn’t trying to impersonate just any pooch. In The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog, and of his friend Marilyn Monroe, O’Hagan has imagined one of the actress’ real-life pets as a well-read and opinionated terrier whose ruminations reveal a new side of Monroe. “Part of the purpose of the book was to try to rescue this person from the size of her iconography,” says the author. “Marilyn once said men used her, women judged her, and only the dog loved her. I thought only a dog could look at her without selfhood getting in the way.”

Readers might be surprised that Maf has little to say about Monroe’s relationship with John F. Kennedy, said Patrick Ryan in Granta. But that’s part of O’Hagan’s “debunking” effort. “Kennedy was a small thing in Marilyn’s life,” he says. “They were hardly ever together.” Yet part of the fun of giving Maf a voice, O’Hagan admits, was imagining Maf’s reactions to various other larger-than-life personalities. The feisty terrier feels threatened by Frank Sinatra, bites playwright Lillian Hellman, and snaps at critic Edmund Wilson. “If Hellman were alive she would certainly sue me,” O’Hagan says. “But I know Maf very well, and he would certainly have tried to take a chunk out of Edmund Wilson, just to set out his critical priorities.”