Markus Zusak: ‘Yes, I swear at home and call my dog a bastard – that’s how we all live’

Markus Zusak has never looked far for sources of dramatic potential. The internationally bestselling writer has long found seeds of the epic in the regular unfolding of daily life.

In 2022, Zusak was consumed with a project that wasn’t working in the wake of Bridge of Clay, the follow-up to The Book Thief, an acclaimed novel that has sold 16m copies since it was published in 2005. His beloved dogs, Archer and Rueben, had died. His family had reluctantly taken in a wolfhound cross called Frosty. One evening, the writer found himself at the intersection of Ocean Street and Syd Einfeld Drive in Sydney’s Woollahra. Frosty lunged at him. Zusak fought back, risking the judgment of the joggers, cyclists and well-heeled women that people this neighbourhood.

“The first line hit me – ‘There’s nothing like having a punch-up with your dog on a crowded city street’,” he says. “As soon as I heard that sentence in my head, I said ‘that’s it’.” He’s aware that his honesty on the page might leave him open to judgment – but he believes it’s a risk worth taking. Our current moment, he says, encourages a focus on surfaces over truth.

“We live in a time when we focus so much on veneer. Yes, I swear at home and call my dog a bastard – that’s how we all live, and I want to show all of that.”

That line opens Three Wild Dogs and the Truth, Zusak’s first work of nonfiction. On first reading, it’s a memoir about Zusak’s relationship with his dogs – Rueben, “like a wolf at your door with a hacksaw”, Archer, “a pretty boy assassin”. Later, Frosty, also from the pound, “the friendliest but naughtiest dog I’ve had”. But it’s also about love and grief and the passage of life. The wildness that exists inside us. The bonds, beyond words, that we share with our animals.

Before I meet Zusak, at the Paddington Gates in Centennial Park, I’m a little wary: in the book, the writer portrays these creatures as equal parts loving and unhinged. There’s a scene that takes place when Zusak is away on tour where his dogs attack a woman who visits to teach piano to his children, Kitty and Noah.

But Frosty, all grins and white-gold fur, lopes towards me with a happy bark. He bounds ahead of us, veering off the path, guiding us forward in giddy circles. He’s intoxicated, it seems, by the breadth of crisp blue sky. The endless expanse of grass. Entranced by Zusak himself, with whom he speaks a silent language; ears prick up and muscles tense at the sound of the whistle that, during the course of our walk, regularly punctuates our conversation.

Three Wild Dogs and the Truth loosely follows the decade that Zusak, catapulted to fame by The Book Thief, is struggling to write Bridge of Clay, a story about five brothers – the Dunbars – who deal with the loss of their mother and a father who abandons them. They live on Archer Street. The popular narrative has painted Zusak as a tortured artist, buckling under the weight of expectations. But, as we fall into step, I notice that the writer, who is wearing a baseball cap and a purple hoodie, seems unburdened. He exudes freedom. Three Wild Dogs and the Truth reminded him of why he fell in love with words as a boy, growing up in Sydney’s Sutherland Shire, with parents – migrants from Germany and Austria – who told him stories around the kitchen table.

“From early on, I loved books and never fell out of love the way other people do,” he laughs. “So many of us were at our best when we were children. This book felt a lot like play. It reminded me of when I first started writing.”

In Three Wild Dogs and the Truth, dogs mark time. They are keepers of memory. When Zusak first meets his wife, Mika, he must endear himself to her parents’ dog, Tyja, a German shepherd-meets-rottweiler known for baring its teeth at strangers. Then, when his daughter Kitty is three-and-a-half-years-old, Rueben, “a mix of 16 different breeds” comes to live with them. They explore the back yard together. She turns pages and he sits beside her. Now, he says, his children have grown up. “Now you are talking to your kids, arguing with your kids,” he says. “Your kids leave you and all the humans you love go out into the world in different ways.”

But dogs, he says, represent lifelong devotion.

“Your dogs know only you – their whole life has been you,” he says.

They live through the phases of life that humans do.

“You get this little 10 to 15-year window of youth and chaos and then middle age,” he says. “You get this whole spectrum of beautiful life in a shorter frame.”

We ascend a grassy knoll and Frosty, a stick in his mouth, is tearing ahead. He sees a labrador, hurtling in its direction until Zusak whistles. “When we first used to bring him here, he would have been running into trees, jumping on to people,” he says. We are standing in front of a valley that Zusak tells me used to be a swamp, home to banksias and paperbarks. Here, in his book, Zusak recounts that Rueben and Archer kill a marsupial and Zusak’s response isn’t just testament to a love for his animals but proof of the lengths we will go to protect our kin, the feral instincts we suppress, that bind us to the natural world, no matter how much we deny it.

“I think [they] unlock a part of you that is down there, that is primal – but willing to do what needs to be done,” he says.

Zusak glances at Frosty, who has dropped the stick, spotting a group of small animals fossicking in the soil for food. The writer warns his dog to stay still. We wind up the path and stop, in our tracks, in front of a forest. Frosty growls excitedly. The small animals are black cockatoos, Zusak tells me, that have migrated from the South Coast for winter.

“They come here to eat the pine cones, and some mornings, there are 20 to 30 up on the branches,” he says. “A couple of years ago, I wouldn’t have been able to stop him.”

Frosty, he says, represents the memories of his life with the dogs he lost. He misses them every day.

“They were my guys. You realise what you are able to cope with.” Losing Rueben and Archer, he says, was a “training ground” for grieving human losses. “There’s a wilderness you are unlocking, but a compassion as well – and your own capacity for loyalty and love.”

Zusak’s love for his dogs, and his struggles to tame them, showed him that life and writing involve chaos and surrender.

“Rueben was such a presence but Archie was a tremendous loss.”

Writing these deaths pushed him to emotional extremes. But it’s a necessary part of the process, he says, for a reader to feel like they are present, experiencing what he is describing. He likes this act of surrender to emotional power.

“When I wrote about both those deaths I went to pieces,” he says. “When people say to me, at the end of The Book Thief, when everyone dies, did you dread writing that? And I say, ‘I am waiting the whole time to write that scene. I want to be decimated.’”

• Three Wild Dogs and the Truth is out now through Picador Australia