Misery memoirs with added Fido

Even in the UK, it sold an amazing 300,000 in hardback and the paperback, just out (Hodder, £7.99), promises to do even better.

John Grogan was a young, newly married journalist in Florida when he and his wife bought a labrador puppy, thinking it might somehow be good practice for having a child. Marley soon grew into an hyperactive monster weighing 97lbs and with an outsize character to match.

As Grogan tells it, Marley's life was a series of comic misadventures. There's the time he ate Mrs Grogan's gold necklace, so that it had to be retrieved the other end; the time he was taken to obedience training but was ejected for bad behaviour & Grogan spins out each mishap into an extended anecdote, tear-jerking and rib-tickling for all he's worth.

At the same time, he tells the story of the rest of his family. His wife, Jenny, lost her first baby at 10 weeks, had a difficult time with another pregnancy, and suffered some post-natal depression, but on the whole it's a cheery tale of American prosperity and freedom. The couple have three healthy children and Grogan loves his job.

All the lessons drawn are corny as hell.

Grogan says: "Marley taught me about living each day with unbridled exuberance and joy, about seizing the moment and following your heart. He taught me to appreciate the simple things a walk in the woods, a fresh snowfall, a nap in a shaft of winter sunlight & Mostly he taught me about friendship and selflessness and, above all else, unwavering loyalty." Sadly, even Marley couldn't teach Grogan how to write any better than that, but he did posthumously make his family a fortune, nonetheless. Some dog, then.

You end up really believing that it's Marley's big heart that makes the book work, not Grogan's ho-hum philosophising.

A year on and the publishers have been, as ever, galvanised (the word derives from the 18th century scientist who used sparks to elicit twitches from the leg muscles of dead frogs). If they don't quite have a Marley, they can package what they do have to suit the same market.

The core non-fiction genre at the moment is the misery memoir. So now we have a strange new mongrel form: misery memoirs with added fido.

For example, there's My Life with George: Surviving Life with the King of the Canines by Judith Summers (Michael Joseph, £14.99). In 1998, Judith Summers's husband Udi Eichler died of cancer at 56, leaving her alone with her nine-year-old son Joshua. To help them through their grief, they got a dog, a Cavalier King Charles spaniel. And overindulged it hugely.

George, by Summers's own account, is insufferably spoiled. He sleeps on her bed. When he loses his appetite, she takes him to the vet and asks if he's got anorexia. Not much later, he has to be put on a diet, because his weight has doubled.

In total, she estimates, she has spent "around £15,000 in vet's bills, hotel bills, hairdos, dog food and pet insurance".

Summers fatally remarks of her pampered pooch: "No man has ever loved me as unconditionally as he does, and I'm quite certain no man ever will." Nevertheless, she started dating nine months after her husband's death.

She meets Zach, a trim American academic. But Zach doesn't like George.

"Even George's most affectionate and ingratiating gesture compulsive licking doesn't go down well with Zach," Summers says, as though mystified. To the reader, it seems miraculous he hasn't stamped on the varmint, contenting himself instead with secretly sketching "a rather Leonardo da Vinci-esque doodle of an imaginary machine that turned live dogs into sausage strings".

An American memoir, A Three Dog Life by Abigail Thomas (Weidenfeld, £9.99) is rather more serious. Abigail Thomas's husband Rich was brain-damaged when he was hit by a car and never fully recovered his memory or sanity.

Her dogs help her through: a hound, a beagle, a dachsund-whippet cross. "My dogs make me laugh, and they comfort me, and I'm never bored with them," she says.

The secret may be quite simple, she thinks: dogs don't talk.

The disturbing twist in this tale, though, is that it was while trying to catch the first dog, Harry the beagle, who had slipped his leash, that her husband was hit by the car.

And: "Rich hadn't wanted a dog." A Friend Like Henry by Nuala Gardner (Hodder, £14.99) is yet another memoir about autism, this time plus mutt. But it is truly affecting. Gardner's first child, Dale, proved to be severely autistic and such hard work to care for that she herself became ill. Then when Dale was five, they visited a dog-owning family and realised that he could respond to them.

They acquired Henry, an affectionate golden retriever puppy, and he proved to be Dale's route into a richer life.

For a long time, his parents had to pretend to be Henry talking to him to get through to Dale. What makes the story of his growing socialisation and improving speech so affecting is that the stages are recognisable to all parents, if greatly slowed. It was Henry that Dale first said he loved; then the same day, his parents.

As with Marley, the story of Henry's death is terribly touching. Dale himself comments: "Henry brought me through all of my childhood and because of that I was able to help him at the end, when he needed me & I have decided that for the rest of my life I am never going to let my amazing dog down, so that he will be proud of me, as I will always be of him." And there's a lovely picture he has drawn of his noble friend, too.

And what are these books really about? In the chapter introducing Henry, Gardner quotes a sign on a noticeboard: "Puppies for sale: the only love which money can buy." Lucky for us..