They busted his knees, terrified his friends, then Markus Zusak’s dogs delivered

The price of wild dogs is freedom. You can never completely relax – Markus Zusak

Markus Zusak was in a dilemma. He had almost finished his latest book, a memoir called Three Wild Dogs and the Truth. It’s about the chaos, joy, pain, love and sheer panic that Reuben, Archer and Frosty have inflicted on his family over the years.

But he was worried about his children, his daughter in particular. She was appalled that the story of how two of the dogs had killed Bijoux, one of the family cats, would become widely known. After all, she hadn’t even told her best friend.

Frosty does his best to get as close as possible to Markus Zusak.Credit: Edwina Pickles

It was Christmas 2022 and Zusak was talking to his mother-in-law at the kitchen table. “What’s happening with that dog book you’ve been writing?” she asked. And he told her he wasn’t sure he was going to submit it to his publisher. He was surprised when all she said was OK.

A few days later he was at her house, helping her pack up stuff in preparation for a move back to Poland after the death of her husband. “She said, if you want to publish that book, you should,” Zusak says. “She said, everything those kids have is because of your writing. That is your life. This is your life we’re talking about here and they need to understand that.”

Galvanised, Zusak went home to his wife, daughter and son in Woollahra, and that night again got to grips with the manuscript. Two weeks later it went off to his publisher.

“I’ll be forever grateful to her. The interesting thing is as soon as I said to the kids, ‘Mum and I have talked about it, and this is what we’re doing’, they just went OK, and as soon as they said OK, then I knew they’d be right behind it.”

Dogs have almost always played a part in Zusak’s writing life (certainly in terms of them sitting with him as he writes). His first four books were for young adults. The Underdog came out in 1999 when he was only 24 and was followed by two sequels, Fighting Ruben Wolfe, and When Dogs Cry. Then came The Messenger, which was an international bestseller.

But when The Book Thief (the exception, no dog) appeared in 2005, his life changed forever. It has sold about 17 million copies around the world and was turned into a film starring Emily Watson and Geoffrey Rush. “It still amazes me,” he says. “It’s just got a bit of lucky magical dust sprinkled over it; it just sort of has its own ride through the world and people love it.”

In between his big bestseller and his dog days came Bridge of Clay, which for whatever reason took him a frustrating 13 years to finish. It finally appeared in 2018.

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Three Wild Dogs is the story of Reuben, Archer and Frosty – all rescued from the pound, as Zusak calls it – and how they erupted into the household. It would be a mistake for any would-be reader to think that they’re about to encounter some sort of paean to humanity’s ongoing love affair with canine companions. Zusak had no intention of glossing over anything in the book. These creatures were four-legged hoodlums.

“You know how we’re all pretty good at veneer these days, curating photos, showing the best parts, the most ordered parts of our lives,” he says. “But there’s a part of us that kind of wants to welcome the chaos because we want to be tested, and I think we understand that that’s actually where our best stories are.”

The book is also a family memoir and a sort of tangential account of Zusak’s writing life. But what was the truth he was after? Was it just honesty about how he had lost his temper with the dogs on numerous occasions? Was there a philosophical truth lurking in there about what dogs bring to us or vice versa?

“You use the world philosophical and that was exactly the kind of book that I didn’t want it to be. The test for this book all the time was does this feel like we’re just sitting in the kitchen and I’m telling you these stories about these dogs we have? I wanted to be absolutely truthful about some of the lies I told about these dogs to get them off the hook. It was here’s the truth of all the love, all the joy, all the beauty, all the barbarism in both the dogs and in me and in my family.”

Markus Zusak with Archer (left) “a pretty boy assassin” and Reuben, ” like a wolf at your door with a hacksaw”.

There are other truths as well, questions that gnaw away at him, such as how many other animals die to provide food to keep a dog alive. “So what truth do you then discover about yourself and your own integrity or lack of integrity.”

In the book he describes Reuben, the first dog he and his wife Mika took into their family in late 2009, as “a big bad brindle thing, like a wolf at your door with a hacksaw – a dark prince in exile, or purgatory”. Archer, who joined the family in 2011, “was a pretty boy assassin – a handsome blond with honey-gold eyes, and legs with a lineage to royalty ... We were sure he was Reuben’s hitman.”

It was Mika who found Reuben while she was pregnant with their son Noah. Their daughter Kitty loved animals so it was almost inevitable they would get a dog, but Mika had “a knack for finding problem dogs”. Reuben was the first dog Zusak had owned, and it took him a while to warm to him, something that baffles him today.

His feelings for Reuben are similar to the pleasure he finds in writing: “Those moments when you’re reading a book and it can be a plot but also something in a sentence, where you think you can predict where that sentence is going to go ... and you can be totally surprised by something left of centre there instead. He was that animal, he was a careering freight train on the one hand and also this dog with a dash of cyborg, of Terminator, quite intelligent with a real sense of duty.”

This was the dog so utterly devoted to Kitty, yet wanted to eat Noah – “and would have done so if we didn’t stop him” – when he came home as a newborn. The dog that busted Zusak’s knee – he had a reconstruction six months after Reuben died – “he got me from the grave”. The dog who so terrified two writer friends that they never visited the house again. (And they couldn’t believe it when they heard the Zusak’s got “another” dog.)

Reuben (left) and Archer in their element.

That other beast was Archer, who was supposed to bring them luck – the characters in Bridge of Clay live on Archer Street. But teaming up with Reuben simply doubled the chaos. Their regular early morning walks in Centennial Park could be tricky, witness the fate of one possum knocked out of its tree by Reuben and then mauled by the two dogs.

After Zusak got the dogs under control – “have you ever tried pulling your dog off something it’s trying to kill? Believe me,” he writes, “it’s near impossible” – he saw a man and his child heading their way. What to do? The thought of them witnessing the horror was ghastly. Deny what happened, hide the bits of possum? To his relief the man stayed out of Reservoir Fields, and Zusak rang the ranger to report the horror, but without identifying the guilty parties: “It’s like I’m in a noir thriller, but the slapstick version.”

People were always telling Zusak he should write about his dogs, but the truth was he couldn’t find a beginning for the story. That was not until Frosty – “he makes the other two look like saints” – turned up.

First, Reuben’s cancer got the better of him and he was put to sleep in November 2019 as bushfires were sweeping parts of NSW and Victoria. Archer – “he was only just getting started, he’d become such a gentle soul” – followed less than two years later.

“A dying dog is precious,” Zusak writes. “Forget diamonds, pearls and any other worldly treasures. Give me fur and stink and pleading eyes, and the sad warm dog in your arms. You can’t know how much you loved them, I think, ’til you call for the executioner, or you get the results from the blood tests, and just stand in the shower and cry.”

Without a dog, Zusak felt in 2021 as if he had lost his identity, no longer who he had been. That is, until July when the family met a wild dog “and we kept him”. Another one. And it was one of the real squabbles that Zusak had with Frosty that got him the first line of his book: “There’s nothing like having a punch-up with your dog on a crowded city street.”

He’s grateful that Frosty was “such a shit at the beginning, thank God he was so crazy, because if he wasn’t he wouldn’t have given me that perfect beginning and he wouldn’t have been such a conduit back to the other dogs.”

I wondered whether he found writing non-fiction liberating, particularly after the struggles with Bridge of Clay? “I still did things the same [as in his fiction], and the only difference is you’re still trying to form a truth, but in this case you’re just trying to form it exactly and precisely and imaginatively as you can with things that have actually happened.”

The book that most influenced him in writing Three Wild Dogs is a surprising one at first glance: The Imaginary Girlfriend, John Irving’s memoir about wrestling, a sport the American novelist practised and coached for many years.

“And underneath that, it’s about writing,” Zusak, says. “Wrestling was a parallel, and what is writing if it isn’t wrestling? And in this case, what is writing if it’s not navigating your way through the chaos of ideas and the chaos of sentences and the chaos of your doubts and fears and all of these obstacles that are in front of you to create a book. So for me, the story of these dogs couldn’t do anything but mirror both my family life and my writing life.”

Of course, writing about Reuben and Archer often made him cry, but also made him laugh and feel all the emotions they had stirred up all over again. Reuben, he says, was the kind of spirit animal of the family, “our guy”. Archer’s loss was the big one: “I felt like he could really come into his own as this quite gentlemanly character.” Frosty “keeps the other dogs in the air, but at some point, too, he’s just totally himself”.

When Zusak first tried writing about Reuben and Archer, he couldn’t. The problem? “Abject fear.” He couldn’t bear the thought of failing them. He needn’t worry: he hasn’t.

Three Wild Dogs and the Truth is published by Picador on September 10 at $36.99.

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