Marley and Me film features "The Kind I'm Likely to Get"

About a year ago, I signed a release for the use of my book of stories, The Kind I'm Likely to Get, in the film of Marley and Me. This amused me, since there are no dogs in the book that I can remember, but my own dog books weren't the proper time period for the film, so they picked the stories. If nothing else, this guaranteed that I would buy a ticket to the film, just to see if my book made it onto the screen. So, last December, I drove out to the suburbs for a matinee, and once the movie started I remembered that, even if the movie was no good at all, it was bound to make me sob like a baby. I began to panic.

The film, it turned out, wasn't bad at all. And I sobbed at least three times, beginning with a montage of how the dog and the character's lives blur together over the course of a year. Of course, it isn't perfect either, and I found myself missing the dog an awful lot during some of the scenes in the later part of the film. And that's when "The Kind I'm Likely to Get" popped up. Jennifer Aniston suffers from post-partum depression and orders Owen Wilson to take the dog to live somewhere else. Later, when he comes home from dropping the dog with a friend, he finds Aniston asleep on the couch with my book in her lap. She wakes up, suddenly recovered from her condition, and announces that the dog can come home.

So there you have it--my stories are a cure-all.

The movie is available on DVD now.