Don’t Mind Me While I Wear My Dog

Fiction When you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission. SEPARATION ANXIETYBy Laura Zigman What is the name of the emotion that mixes exasperation with sympathy? This was the question going through my head as I read “Separation Anxiety,” Laura Zigman’s wistful and somewhat erratic fifth novel. The story of Judy Vogel, a middle-aged writer, mother and wife consumed with loneliness as her husband and son drift away, it is a tale that elicits a curious combination of those feelings.

Judy is spiraling, feeling “connected to nothing and no one, lost, and certain only that I’m destined to die broke and alone. ” She is the author of “There’s a Bird on Your Head,” a children’s classic that was turned into a television show — but that well has long since dried up and her follow-up books were disappointments. So now Judy writes content for Well/er, a health and happiness website. Her devolution from celebrated writer to content generator has her knocking out “a few glib paragraphs” on inane topics such as “Does working at home make you less attractive?

” and she keenly feels the ignominy of this decline. More important, her seventh grader, Teddy, is increasingly noncommunicative; and her marriage to her husband, Gary, is on life support. They can’t afford a divorce so they live in the same house, Gary taking the basement where the “gurgling of the bong is deafening” from upstairs. Judy is indeed betwixt and between — until she comes upon an old baby sling and decides to wear her dog, Charlotte.

This warm-blooded contact is “restorative … like a new drug,” so she makes a daily, surreptitious habit of it. Aside from loneliness, her flatlining marriage and her distant son, Judy is up against other challenges: sadness over parents who died within two years of each other; a best friend, Glenn, who has late-stage breast cancer; and unpaid tuition bills at Teddy’s private school. These issues lead her to a frankly bewildering set of events, among them attending a creativity/life guru’s Vermont retreat, hosting People Puppets (people in animal costumes) in exchange for a tuition discount, signing up for braces because the orthodontist is a middle-school crush and searching for the culprit in a series of school-hallway pooping incidents. Accompanying her through this dizzying odyssey is Gary, a musician who once opened for Aerosmith (early successes are a marital motif here) and is now a part-time snackologist supplying food to a WeWork-like company.