W. Bruce Cameron is the creator of the most beloved brand of family entertainment in the world. His 2010 novel, A Dog’s Purpose, has been translated into over 50 languages, spent 52 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and continues to top bestseller lists worldwide. The 2012 sequel, A Dog’s Journey, was an instant New York Timesbestseller. The Amblin/Universal film of A Dog’s Purpose (Cameron and his wife Cathryn Michon wrote the screenplay) is the most successful international live-action dog movie of all time, beating previous champ Marley and Me. Cameron has appeared on some of the most popular shows on television: Oprah, The Today Show, Good Morning America, CBS This Morning, 360 Anderson Cooper and Entertainment Tonight to name just a few. His latest novel is Love, Clancy: Diary of a Good Dog, a deeply moving story with a brand-new cast of characters, including one very good dog.
Do you remember the first dog you ever had?
A little black Lab puppy. There were no dogs in my neighborhood when I was growing up, and ours was the only house with a fenced-in backyard. I remember running around this open field with a gang of boys playing war and other games. One day my father walked through the gate with this black Labrador puppy named Cammie, and we ran toward each other like we had been separated at birth. When I wrote A Dog’s Purpose, I lifted that scene from my own childhood to describe the moment that Ethan, who is eight years old just like I was, meets Bailey, who was based on my dog Cammie.
A Dog’s Purpose is probably your best-known book. What’s the backstory?
I had moved to Los Angeles and met the woman who is now my wife. We were both freshly divorced and at an age where dating just didn’t seem worth it, but we decided to go on a date anyway. At one point, she asked me to meet her parents, who lived in the Bay Area. The drive from L.A. can take several days so we had a lot of time to talk. She told me that she had lost her dog, who was only three when he died, and then she said, “I’m never getting another dog. I can’t go through this again.” My immediate reaction was, this relationship is over. But we had many hours ahead of us because we were on the 405 moving at the speed of park. When I want to persuade someone of something, I make up a story, and I decided that I could convince her that she was wrong if I did that. I wanted her to believe that the love she had for her dog was available to her in another dog if she’d just open her heart. So, I told her a story about a dog who reincarnates, remembers each life and finds his way back to save the boy he belonged to first. The message was that the dog that comes back to you in the future might be your angel dog, your one dog.
So, did it work?
She insisted that I had to write it. Now Cathryn has a book of her own coming out on September 10, 2024. It’s called I’m Still Here: A Dog’s Purpose Forever.
What can you tell us about the sequel, A Dog’s Journey?
The final chapter of A Dog’s Purpose suggests that the story is over, but I realized that I had written a story about a dog who doesn’t die and owed people an explanation. In the first book the dog keeps returning to different people to learn different life lessons. So, I flipped the plot and made the dog an old soul in the second book. He’s here to learn his true purpose and discover what makes life meaningful. My wife and I wrote the screenplay for the film, which is probably my favorite of the two because it was directed by a woman named Gail Mancuso. You can tell that she’s also a woman who loves dogs.
What is it about dogs that make us grieve so long and hard when we lose them?
I think it’s because we have so thoroughly domesticated dogs that they are completely incapable of living on their own. They need us. That’s not true of cats or many other domesticated animals. You can’t open the door and tell a Dachshund, “Now go hunt.” They won’t fend for themselves. Actually, this is a great segue into a promo for my next book, My Three Dogs, which comes out on October 29, 2024. It’s the story of a fun-loving doodle named Archie, a quick-witted Jack Russell named Luna and a loyal Australian Shepherd named Riggs. Their owner, a man named Liam, is in a car accident and falls into a coma. Because he had made no prior arrangements, two of the dogs are taken to new homes. Riggs is the alpha dog, and he sets off to find the rest of his pack and round them up so they can be reunited with Liam, but they end up living on the street for a time.
While you’ve been writing most of your life, you’ve said that success came later for you and that you have a lot of unpublished books taking up space in your closet. What can you tell us about that?
Honestly, while I had always been the best writer in my creative writing class, I was a nobody when it came to competing in the marketplace. I had written nine unpublished books before I sold A Dog’s Purpose. Maybe that’s because the subject matter was all over the place. Failure is how we learn, and I had a lot of them.
Your latest book is Love, Clancy: Diary of a Good Dog. What can we expect?
It’s a departure for me in some way. For one thing, I try really hard not to anthropomorphize the dogs I write about. I give them a sophisticated vocabulary because dogs have a vocabulary of about 250 words. I also give them complicated feelings, thoughts and emotions, but nothing that doesn’t ring true. In this book though, Clancy keeps a diary. The first line is, “Dear Diary, the cat is despicable.” His goal is to get rid of the cat, but Clancy is a yellow Lab, and they’re not known to be strategic thinkers. His owner has a lot of crazy people in his life, and they all go on a road trip. It’s told from the dog’s point of view, and I think it’s the funniest book I’ve ever written.
