Dr. Karen Fine is a holistic veterinarian who writes about the human-animal bond, holistic veterinary medicine, pet loss, grief, and narrative medicine. She owned and operated her own house-call practice, Fine Veterinary House Calls, for twenty-five years. She is the author of the New York Times bestselling memoir The Other Family Doctor: A Veterinarian Explores What Animals Can Teach Us About Love, Life and Mortality and the veterinary textbook Narrative Medicine in Veterinary Practice: Improving Client Communication, Patient Care, and Veterinary Well-Being. Fine also co-edits Reflections, an online journal on veterinary narrative medicine, and has written for TheNew York Times, the Brevity blog, Bark magazine, and Inside Your Cat’s Mind. She is a graduate of the Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine at Tufts University and Brandeis University, and is certified in veterinary acupuncture through the International Veterinary Acupuncture Society.Fine currently practices small animal medicine in Central Massachusetts, where she lives with her husband and son and an assortment of rescue animals.
EB: Many of the writers featured in this series started off writing nonfiction in general and then got drawn to the specific subject of animals, but I believe for you, being a veterinarian, it was the opposite experience? What first drew you to animals, and then how did you begin writing nonfiction about them?
KF: I’ve been drawn to animals for as long as I can remember, even though we didn’t have any at home [when I was growing up]. I love to read, and in college I took literature classes for my electives, mostly through Brandeis University’s African and African American Studies department. That involved writing papers. And then once I started working as a veterinarian, I occasionally wrote about difficult encounters I’d experienced, to help process them in my mind. However, I never kept a journal—I wish I had, it would have been really useful! I did write a couple of articles here and there; for instance, I wrote about the pay gap in veterinary medicine and holistic medicine for veterinary publications.
Once I began writing the book in earnest, I was advised to publish articles geared at my target audience, which made perfect sense to me. This advice came from Jane Friedman, while I was taking a multi-part workshop with her about writing a proposal. My target audience was people who consider their animals to be family members. So I went to Barnes & Noble, which had a huge magazine section, and I bought a copy of each magazine geared to pet owners. I brought them home and read them with an eye to which one I would like to be published in, and which magazine could I write something for that would be a good fit. I chose Bark magazine, and I pitched the editor an article about rituals for grieving, and she was interested. It’s funny because I was envisioning a prescriptive article, and what came out when I sat down to write was an essay, and it’s one of my favorite things I’ve written. (Ironically, I just looked for the link and it’s unavailable now that Bark was bought by The Wildest.)
EB: So then how did The Other Family Doctor come about? When did you know you wanted to write a memoir about your experiences as a veterinarian?
KF: I had this idea that I wanted to write to help people deal with pet loss, and that I wanted to tell Rana’s story. Rana was my “heart dog” who died young from cancer. She was the Dog of Honor and Interspecies Representative (my husband’s idea for a title, which I loved!) in my wedding. I had the idea of a book in the back of my mind for a long time. I saw so many people suffer over the loss of their beloved animals, and I wanted to address that with more people than I saw in practice. I wanted to share how common it is to struggle with what can be an enormous yet often unrecognized loss, because I think people sometimes feel alone in their grief.
Once I found out about the increased risk of suicide among veterinarians, I felt compelled to share what I call “the secret lives of vets” to help our clients and ourselves recognize the complex issues we deal with regularly. I wanted to talk about the things we rarely speak of in my profession, even among ourselves, like euthanasia, and some of the morally and ethically complex situations we regularly face. Veterinary medicine is filled with perfectionists who are very stoic (myself included), and many don’t like to admit anything we perceive as weakness, even to ourselves.
EB: I’m so glad you decided to write about that—I think it’s really important to have books out there from the veterinarian perspective. Anyway, how did you then get the final push to start writing?
KF: What compelled me to actually sit down and begin writing was a book I read: Orange is the New Black by Piper Kerman. I’ve never seen the television show, but I really liked the book and how she told the story of her unique situation and what it was like for a well-educated, upper-middle-class white woman to be in federal prison due to some very bad decisions she’d made many years earlier. It made me think: How could I talk about veterinary medicine that way? How could I show readers what it’s like to confront these ethically charged situations, and what it’s like to euthanize your patients as a medical practitioner? I read her book during a vacation to Disney, and when I got home, I began writing.
After I started writing, I couldn’t stop! I felt like the story came out of me like a hairball that had been stuck for a long time. The chronology about my own dog, Rana, was a natural story line, although certain parts were painful to write. Everything else I wanted to say filled in between that structure.
EB: My favorite type of nonfiction mixes together personal stories with bigger picture research and reporting. While your book is clearly a memoir, I also felt like I learned so much about the experience of veterinarians and the history of the practice, and I love how you wove it all together. What sorts of research did you do for the book, for both the memoir parts and the more research-focused parts?
KF: I didn’t do interviews like you did for your amazing book—
EB: Oh, shush, thank you.
KF: But I did do some research into some of the concepts I included, especially those that involve or contrast human medicine and veterinary medicine. I’ve always felt that veterinarians and physicians have so many more similarities than differences, yet we exist in separate spheres. For instance, I researched self-disclosure, which involves practitioners sharing parts of their own life stories with patients or in our case, clients. That’s how I stumbled across narrative medicine. I was so fascinated by narrative medicine that I pitched an article about it to a veterinary magazine. Two years later, an acquisitions editor for a veterinary textbook publisher read my article and contacted me to ask if I’d like to write a veterinary textbook on the topic. That became my textbook, Narrative Medicine in Veterinary Practice.
I also researched anticipatory grief, which is something I see a lot in practice, and something I experience personally. Anticipatory grief is the experience of grieving while your loved one is still alive, and may even be perfectly healthy, but just the thought of losing them can make you upset. I think when you work with animals and see some of the things that can happen medically, it can make you think about health and how we sometimes take it for granted, and how precarious it can be. And I think anticipatory grief for animals is quite common, because we expect to outlive them (unless you have a parrot or a tortoise), so we sometimes imagine losing them ahead of time even when they’re perfectly healthy. Also, if you’ve grieved an animal before, perhaps you try to prepare yourself for the loss, knowing how painful it can be.
EB: Did writing The Other Family Doctor change your relationship to animals in any way? Or did it change how you now approach your work as a veterinarian?
KF: Wow, that’s an interesting question! I think one thing that came about as I wrote was that I felt less isolated in my experiences as a veterinarian, especially as I studied things like imposter syndrome. I realized that if I felt (or had felt) a certain way, it was likely that others had too. So, I think ultimately it gave me more confidence in my views and how I felt about my experiences.
EB: What do you think are some of the challenges of writing about subjects you can’t interview directly? What are some of the rewards?
KF: I’ve never been able to have direct conversations with my patients, so it’s very natural to me. If I’d practiced on humans first, I can imagine it would have been a difficult transition. Acting as an interpreter for humans is part of the job, but I also rely on the animal’s caretakers to act as interpreters for me about what is normal for their animal as an individual. It’s such a unique and interesting relationship between the three of us. After so many years of practice, it feels like a very natural relationship.
EB: But in your book, you also write about people, too—the many clients who love the pets who are your patients. Was it more or less challenging to write about people compared to animals? What was rewarding about writing about these particular people?
KF: I consider each human-animal bond to be its own entity, and these relationships are critical to veterinary practice, for me at least. The most rewarding thing is seeing how much people love their animals and how fully a part of our lives they can be. I think writing about people was probably harder, mostly because I wanted not to show anyone in a negative light, and I wanted to do justice to their bonds with their animals.
EB: And, in general, what do you think are the biggest challenges and rewards are of writing nonfiction, not just nonfiction about animals?
KF: I can’t imagine writing fiction, as I don’t think I have the imagination! Writing can be very rewarding, as sometimes I write something I didn’t know I was thinking, as though my fingers are writing the thoughts before I have them.
When writing nonfiction, you can’t change the story, but you can frame it like a photograph: what do you include, what do you leave out, and how do you adjust the lighting to tell the story you want to tell? And for memoir, how do you choose what parts of your life to reveal, and what to keep to yourself? You want to tell your authentic story but keep some element of privacy, so I find there is an interesting balance there.
EB: I love that comparison between writing nonfiction and photography. Totally stealing that for the next class I teach!
Also, I have to ask even if it may seem obvious to both of us, but why do you think it is important that humans read and write about non-humans?
KF: We are a very human-centric society, and I think we make a lot of assumptions about animals that aren’t true, for instance that many animals that look similar will act similarly as well, and that just because animals can’t communicate like humans they aren’t as intelligent or don’t possess other skills that we may not. I think we underestimate animals as a society.
For me, the connections with non-humans are critical both for my work and in my life in general, and I think it’s important to explore those connections—to see what we get right, and to examine what we don’t. A couple of examples of what we don’t get right would be the large numbers of dogs that are bred in puppy mills, and the “dog shaming” photos and videos that show dogs appearing to act “guilty” when in reality they are simply anxious because people are talking sternly to them.
EB: Who are some other writers that you admire who write nonfiction about non-humans? Do you have a favorite passage from a particular book or essay that you’d like to share?
KF: Sy Montgomery is one of my favorite writers, and I know you admire her too!
EB: Yes! I am obsessed. She has a new book on turtles that just came out this month!
KF: There’s a lovely quote by Sy Montgomery from her book How To Be A Good Creature: A Memoir In Thirteen Animals that I have on my Goodreads profile:
I often wish I could go back in time and tell my young, anxious self that my dreams weren’t in vain and my sorrows weren’t permanent. I can’t do that, but I can do something better. I can tell you that teachers are all around to help you; with four legs or two or eight or even none; some with internal skeletons, some without. All you have to do is recognize them as teachers and be ready to hear their truths.
Besides Sy Montgomery, I actually tend to read more fiction than nonfiction, and some of my favorite writers are Ann Patchett, Barbara Kingsolver, and Alexander McCall Smith.
EB: Finally, my favorite question: Who are the non-humans in your life right now?
KF: We currently have two dogs and a cat. The dogs are Toffee and Sesame, both of whom are rescues from Aruba. There’s a rescue called New Life for Paws that flies puppies to New England where they are placed with a network of fosters until they are adopted. Our cat is Lilac, who was a barn kitten from Connecticut.