There’s a saying that “it takes a village” to raise a child. Matthew Sigman’s touching memoir shows how one village transformed the life of an adult from grief to acceptance, and from solitude to community.
After earning an MBA at Wharton, Sigman, a gay Jewish man, lived in New York City’s West Village. Single at the time, he worked in digital media as a music journalist. It wasn’t long before he decided to take a hiatus, so he quit his day job and adopted a dog called Augie. Sigman’s heartfelt recollections of their daily adventures — playful and endearing — movingly capture their deep love for each other. They reveled in each other’s company every day for eighteen years.
When Augie died, Sigman’s grief was so great that he felt the need to get away. He set his sights on Italy — and a friend suggested the Piedmont region, in Italy’s northwest. He settled in a village called Quarna, with a population of seven hundred people, seeking adventure, friendship, and laughter.
He found what he was looking for, and more. Heading to Quarna by taxi, he endured twenty-three hairpin turns, at high speed, on the hilly roads to the town — and he and the driver became fast friends. Matthew’s sense of humor also helped him get used to local life. When a seat finally opened up at a packed restaurant, he thought, “Here I was, in a hamlet 4,000 miles from New York City, and it was still hard to get a table on Saturday night!”
His descriptions of the village are wonderfully evocative. “To get to the apartment,” he writes, “one walked up a crumbling external stone staircase hewn a century before, still sooty from the fire decades earlier.” In the dining room “a gleaming mahogany table and a matching breakfront filled with floral china, demitasse sets, cordial glasses, and crystal wine goblets.”
Matthew Sigman also has a keen eye for the unique qualities of the people he meets in Quarna. He sees them not as foreign curiosities but as his new neighbors and good friends. He’s also perceptive about the village’s tacit social distinctions, including a subtle caste system where the natives are at the top and outsiders at the bottom. Yet he finds that “the afflicted and the selfish are not marginalized or institutionalized or pitied or shunned.”
Matthew moved back to New York to be with his new boyfriend, Collin. Yet over the next seven years he returned to Quarna five times. And the place profoundly changed him — so much so that a Quarna neighbor declared, “you are as close to being a Quarnesi as any fuorestiero [outsider] can be.”
Because of a Dog is an intimate, personal memoir, written as if it were an extended letter to a close friend. Its perceptive portrayal of daily life in the village is a revelation: fascinating, affectionate, entertaining. And Matthew Sigman’s sensitive recollections of his beloved dog, Augie, are achingly beautiful. Love makes the world go round.
Bob Goldfarb is President Emeritus of Jewish Creativity International.
