Writer Camille Perri originally intended her third novel to be a buddy comedy where her characters would solve a crime, but that wasn’t quite working for her.
Then she got a dog: a Brussels Griffon named Pip.
She explained, “It wasn't until I got my dog Pip during the pandemic--we got a ‘pandemic puppy’--and I brought my dog to the dog park for the first time when it struck me, ‘Oh my goodness, I need to make this a dog park novel.’"
Perri is the author of The Assistants and When Katie Met Cassidy. Social Animals is her latest novel where dogs are indeed central to the story.
In a recent What We’re Reading interview Perri, a former librarian, noted that the dog park was a big inspiration because, like the libraries she’s worked at, they’re public spaces where all are welcome and different types of people interact with each other.
She elaborated, “I became a regular at the at the dog park. And what's funny about being a regular is you start to learn everybody's backstories a little bit. You learn about the park gossip, you learn about the park politics. You learn about who has drama with who or who maybe dated who but got their heart broken. There's all sorts of intrigue and it's almost like a soap opera. And when we were going to the dog park regularly during the pandemic, it was mostly our only social life. So I would really look forward to 5:30 every night when we'd head over to the dog park. I looked forward to it like a favorite TV show.”
Social Animals features three lonely women who become friends at an affluent East Coast dog park, but each woman is hiding a secret. This witty and fun story has lot of colorful human and canine characters, and suspense, as each woman’s secret is eventually revealed.
Aside from being fun and adorable characters on their own, the dogs also help the women develop in the story.
Perri noted, “I wanted the dogs to somehow serve as a catalyst for them, for the change that was going to come. So, it's kind of unique to each character how that functions, but for Val, for example … you'll see how the dog sort of forces Val to change and grow and evolve in the way that you like a character to do so in a novel. And each dog sort of functions that way in the book for each of their humans.”
Find out more about writer Camille Perri and Social Animals on her webpage.
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