A few weeks ago, Bruce Goldstein took some time off from his freelance gig writing advertorials for Hearst about the intersection of fashion and the automotive design world to meet me for lunch and talk about his memoir, Puppy Chow Is Better Than Prozac. The book recounts Goldstein’s worst bipolar episodes, his initial therapy sessions, and the arrival into his life of Ozzy, a black Labrador puppy whose presence gradually creates a grounding influence.
Goldstein actually landed what Publisher’s Marketplace would describe as “a good deal” for this story from a major publisher back in 1997, “a lot of money for a punk from Staten Island who had never written anything,” he recalls. When that contract fell apart over what he described as editorial differences, “I couldn’t pack it in.”
Without an agent, he continued sending out his self-designed proposal packages, with specially commissioned photos of Ozzy dog tags engraved with the name of whichever editor he was submitting to that day. Eventually, he convinced an editor at Avalon—for somewhat less money than the ’97 deal—and remembers gleefully how he thrilled he was to get laid off from the job he had then because he was planning to ask for time off for final revisions anyway. (What with the Perseus takeover of Avalon, he bounced around a bit before finally landing at Da Capo.)
Now, with the book into a second printing, Goldstein continues to put together his presentation kits, this time for TV producers, and is looking for a literary agent. In addition to working on a psychological thriller called Jury Duty, he’s also starting to feel a second nonfiction project coming on; his wife is nearly seven months pregnant, and he says that he’s as flooded with information about raising newborns as he was all those years ago when he began learning everything he could about puppies. And Ozzy’s still around—in fact, Goldstein has created a special stamp carved in the likeness of his front paw, so he can “sign” at bookstore events as well.