BALTIMORE -- John Grogan, a former Philadelphia Inquirer columnist and the author of Marley & Me, will present the lecture "Memoir & Me: The Art of First-Person Narrative Nonfiction" on Monday, March 28, at 8 p.m. in Hyman Forum of Goucher College's Athenaeum.
Grogan will discuss his memoirs Marley & Me and The Longest Trip Home and the writing process that went into them. A Q&A session and book signing will follow the lecture.
Tickets are $10 general admission, but free for Goucher students, faculty, staff, and alumnae/i. Tickets must be reserved in advance at www.goucher.edu/tickets.
Grogan was a columnist at the Philadelphia Inquirer when he wrote a column saying goodbye to his incorrigible 13-year-old Labrador retriever, Marley. The next day, hundreds of messages flooded his inbox and voicemail.
The story became Marley & Me: Life and Love with the World's Worst Dog, a 13-year memoir that spans the life of the eponymous yellow Labrador and charts the effect that Marley's energetic and wildly destructive behavior had on Grogan's relationships with his wife and three young children and his career as a columnist for the South Florida Sun-Sentinel and, subsequently, the Philadelphia Inquirer. It became a No. 1 New York Times bestseller with more than 6 million copies in print in 30 languages. The book spawned an abridged teen version, three children's books, and a website for dog-loving Marleyites. In 2008, it was made into a movie starring Owen Wilson and Jennifer Aniston.
Grogan has been featured on Good Morning America, The Today Show, CBS' The Early Show, Fox & Friends, National Geographic Channel's The Dog Whisperer, and in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Newsweek, Life, Better Homes & Garden, and People magazine.
Grogan's latest New York Times bestseller is The Longest Trip Home, a memoir of faith, family, and identity. In the book, he examines his childhood and complicated relationship with his father and his journey to break free of his parents, discover a life of his own, and find his way back home.