Never Leave The Dogs Behind

When the world unravels, what compass do you trust to find your way back to yourself? In Never Leave the Dogs Behind, Brianna Madia argues that the surest compass can be the living beings you love—and the wilder, wordless parts of yourself they awaken. She contends that radical freedom and radical responsibility are two sides of the same coin: to live feral and honest in the desert with four dogs is to shoulder consequences, name your grief, tell the truth, and keep choosing your pack—especially when public opinion, family, and even your own mind urge retreat.

This is not a tidy redemption arc. It’s a heat-drunk, dust-streaked meditation on agency: how to build a life in the open when shame, social media, addiction, and mania keep trying to herd you indoors. Madia breaks the spell of curated van-life mythmaking (think: the Instagrammable version of freedom) and replaces it with something more muscular and tender—freedom as daily work. Her claim is simple and bracing: the dogs saved me, and I saved myself by refusing to abandon them, or the woman I was with them.

A life rebuilt in heat and hail

Set on a nine-acre mesa outside Moab—junipers, washes, lightning that glows pink—Madia’s narrative moves between survival tasks and soul work. One page she’s engineering 840 feet of driveway around living trees, hand-hauling flagstones on a rug with Birdie tugging the other end; the next, she’s writing about the accident that shattered everything: the day her dog Dagwood went under their tire, the white lie online, the GoFundMe, and the wildfire of attention and suspicion that followed. The desert is her mirror and her proving ground. Weather is teacher. Hail forces the Jeep evacuation; monsoons flatten the shed she sweat-built; storms also burn the old script to ash.

The cost of telling, and not telling, the truth

Madia lives inside the modern paradox: to pay the bills, she turned her life into a story, and that story then tried to own her life. The partial truth about Dagwood metastasizes into a snark subreddit (“MadiaSnark”), brand cancellations, and a chilling loneliness of being everywhere seen and nowhere held (see also: Jia Tolentino’s Trick Mirror and Jon Ronson’s So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed). Her argument isn’t that the internet is evil; it’s that platforms flatten multidimensional humans into two-dimensional targets. The antidote isn’t silence; it’s fuller truth and firmer boundaries. When she finally writes, “It was us,” about the accident, it marks a pivot from performative resilience to accountable living.

Addiction, leaving, and the ethics of care

At home, Neil, her husband of a decade, unravels into alcoholism. There’s the bite mark on her hand, the smashed glass, inpatient treatment, and then COVID-era isolation that collapses support structures. She drives south to the desert with Bucket, Dagwood, and a new foster called Birdie. The separation becomes divorce, punctured by the revelation of his dating profile and a two-minute voicemail she never listens to. The lesson is harrowing and humane: you can love someone and still choose life without them; care that costs your life, and your dogs’ stability, is too high a price (compare to David Sheff’s Beautiful Boy and Al-Anon principles of detachment with love).

Making a home the hard way

Mania arrives not as a movie-scene outburst but as months of risky brightness. In that brightness she buys the land, barters an old Jeep for the last $6,000, builds a deck, strings shade, rigs solar, and then—humblingly—rebuilds after storms unmake her work. She drags a shed’s seven-foot roof up a ladder, sobs at step fourteen for lack of a socket wrench, then drives to town and finishes the job. Later, a monsoon reduces that shed to a plastic teepee. The point isn’t stoicism; it’s practice: fail–pivot–repeat. Off-grid living becomes emotional rehab via logistics: water jugs from the Shell station, $5 showers at the Aquatic Center, laundry while streaming a library-downloaded movie in the laundromat’s fluorescent calm.

Dogs, instinct, and the moral of Baja

The book’s pulse is canine. Dagwood’s dawn “rounds,” Bucket’s old-dog patience, Birdie’s comic ferocity, Banjo’s half-wolf heart—together they rewild her. She fosters eight rez puppies (through Underdog Rescue Moab) and keeps the black fluff with the white nose—Banjo—because “he looked at me as if we’d met before.” On a secluded beach in Baja, a naked stranger advances; Birdie plants herself between them and does not blink. You learn what it means to let dogs be dogs—calloused paws, cactus mistakes they only make twice—while keeping the pact: you don’t leave them, ever. That vow later keeps Brianna alive in an estate planner’s office when she realizes no one else can love these four the way she does.

Why this matters for you

If you’ve ever felt hunted by your own life—by other people’s narratives, by family belief systems, by the internet’s glare—this book offers a map. Not a tidy 7-step guide, but a lived sequence: tell the truth; choose the pack that holds you to your freest self; build what keeps that pack fed, sheltered, and safe; accept that storms erase progress; begin again. You’re invited to translate her dogs into your anchors—kids, art, a cause, the body you inhabit—and meet your freedom not as a fantasy but as maintenance. Because the desert’s law is reality’s law: nothing stays, and what stays is what you tend.

Madia’s story detonates with a single catastrophe: Dagwood, her primitive, coyote-like dog, goes under the tire. In the panic of saving his life—surgery, diapers, six hours holding his broken body—she tells the internet a partial truth. A GoFundMe surges. The decision buys time but accrues interest in the currency of shame. When the lie meets the algorithm, what began as triage becomes storyline, then spotlight, then surveillance. The point isn’t that she craved fame; it’s that the architecture of attention requires story, and the first story wasn’t the whole one.

The almost-truth that grew teeth

“We” hit Dagwood, she later writes on Instagram, finally widening the frame to include both driver and passenger. The earlier framing protected her husband Neil and, in protecting him, exposed her alone when strangers—via Reddit and DMs—decided the pronoun was “she.” The digital court of public opinion (see Jon Ronson’s So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed) doesn’t parse nuance; it assigns villains. The lie was survivorship’s reflex; the aftermath is the novel-length bill that reflex sends.

The spotlight that scorches

Attention funded their desert life, but attention also weaponized scrutiny. Anonymous accounts multiplied: briannamadiaisadumpsterfire, claims she’s a thief, a white supremacist, an abuser of dogs. Brands privately concede “trolls” are the problem, then publicly sever ties. She becomes, in her words, “two-dimensional,” a character people tag friends beneath as if she can’t see through the glass. Jia Tolentino (in Trick Mirror) calls this the trap of self-branding: your life becomes evidence for or against a thesis about you. When Madia finally names the accident honestly, she doesn’t ask forgiveness; she reclaims authorship. The healing begins where the flattened self regains depth.

How shame splits a marriage

The cracks weren’t born online; the accident just widened them. Neil’s alcoholism emerges—a bite mark on her hand, smashed tables, a donut-dusted confession in a leather chair. COVID cancels meetings, shuts doors, and puts two already-frayed people on separate islands. In this climate, the email arrives: “I had a great time fucking your husband.” Then the verified dating profile. The marriage can’t hold the combined load of addiction, internet rage, and unspoken truth. Madia’s lesson isn’t that honesty would have prevented the divorce; it’s that delayed truth taxes you in compound interest—on your body, your work, your home. When she writes, “Two people can’t be behind the wheel of one car,” it’s metaphor and memoir at once.

Key Idea

Triage-lying may save a life in the moment, but if you don’t circle back to truth, your future pays the invoice—with interest collected by strangers.

For you, this chapter is a mirror. Where are you holding an almost-truth you’ve labeled “necessary”? Madia doesn’t moralize; she models what repair looks like in the age of screenshots: say the thing, accept fallout, and let that acceptance buy back your agency. Then build your life so your deepest loyalties—human and animal—shape the story, not the other way around.

When Madia’s psychiatrist says “manic episode,” she expects fireworks. Instead, it’s two-plus months of high-voltage coping: ketamine raves by the Colorado River, sleeping under a toppled umbrella with three dogs, waking to a dime-wide hole in her foot; then hyper-competence—spreadsheets at the library, six-figure stacks of W-2s, and a land purchase executed with the ferocity of a survival plan. Mania isn’t only chaos here; it’s architecture. She buys nine acres because she must keep Dagwood alive. She’ll make the world fit that need, and any bank, Realtor, or lender who says no simply hasn’t kept up with her pulse.

Dissociation as defense, diagnosis as doorway

She calls it “turning my life into fiction”—characters instead of friends, plot points instead of days—because if nothing is real, nothing can hurt you (compare Kay Redfield Jamison’s An Unquiet Mind on mania’s seductive invincibility). But naming the episode creates a hinge. The same mind that free-climbs out of grief can also lay out the paperwork that wins a loan with a grueling 12% interest rate. She sells the Jeep from her teenage years for the last $6,000 and signs anyway. Reckless? Absolutely. Also, a lifeline.

Impulse as infrastructure

From “let’s look at property” to “this is my mesa” is a blink. Yet once the land is hers, impulse becomes infrastructure. She maps a driveway in the sand with her arms out like a kid—“a loopty-doo around this tree”—and a local contractor nods: that’ll work. She insists on saving every living juniper. She hauls two forty-two-pound “blueys” of water from a Shell station, times showers at the Aquatic Center, vacuums dishes with a car-wash sprayer. Routines, not revelations, steady her—exactly what depression and mania tend to erode (see Andrew Solomon’s The Noonday Demon on the sanity of structure).

When the body writes the bill

There’s a nosebleed in a friend’s living room that paints her from chin to sternum with red. An ER cauterization follows. The mania settles; paranoia doesn’t. It’s in this afterlight that her mother yells the sentence that reframes the whole book: “Neil isn’t coming back.” The shock isn’t the content; it’s the finality. Mania had blurred edges; truth redraws them. You’re left with the hard grace: love him, and go. And then funnel your fire into things you can lift, cut, build, and move. When you can’t regulate your emotions, regulate your logistics.

Key Idea

If your mind is sprinting, give it heavy objects: titles to sign, stones to drag, posts to set. In the desert, useful labor is a mood stabilizer.

For you, the practice is translation. What are your “blueys,” your 840 feet of driveway, your daily loops that keep you from floating away? You don’t have to buy land; you do have to pick anchors you can touch. And when storms rip them up, start again. You’re not back at zero; you’re back at practice.

Home, in this book, is a verb. Madia doesn’t move into a house; she makes one—out of a 1986 twenty-two-foot trailer with retro stripes, a deck she half-learns on YouTube and half-learns while a shirtless construction worker hugs her from behind with a sander, and a shade sail she drills, impulsively, straight through the roof. She learns the desert’s operating manual through trial: water, waste, weather, and workarounds. Every fix drags a story behind it.

Systems you build when there’s no system

Water lives in blue jugs filled at a Shell spigot or a red-rock spring on River Road. Power comes from a single solar panel she angles by hand to chase the sun, triaging the eight hours of box-fan life the panel buys her. Showers are $5 at the Aquatic Center; laundry is a jumbo machine plus a downloaded movie. Garbage goes into the dollar store’s dumpster. The fridge runs on propane until it doesn’t; a Yeti cooler with a block of ice wins the job. This is what off-grid often is—not a glossy YouTube montage, but a string of small, sensible hacks that keep the lights (and dogs) on.

Weather as boss and benefactor

Desert lightning glows pink; thunder can shake your ribcage. A pop-up monsoon turns a dry wash into a chocolate river, nearly eats the driveway, and reduces her newly built Rubbermaid shed—constructed in 101 degrees with a socket wrench she had to sprint to town to buy—to a collapsed teepee. She doesn’t lament long. The moral isn’t “don’t build.” It’s “build expecting to rebuild.” Every system needs a Plan B; the desert teaches you to skip straight to Plan Next.

Waste is a love language

The toilet doesn’t work because the holding tank is cracked and full of cemented 1990s paper. Enter the barefoot septic man with a truck labeled “POLITICIAN’S THINK TANK.” He tells her to patch the crack and “rehydrate.” She pours twenty gallons into the tank and then watches, stunned, as he churns the soup with a piece of rebar. It’s grotesque, hilarious, and liberating. You can’t Instagram this part, but this part is how you get your life back. Freedom requires functioning plumbing. It’s not less poetic; it’s the poetry of being able to stay.

Key Idea

Romance your routines. Off-grid or not, the unglamorous systems you maintain are what let the meaningful parts of your life breathe.

If you’re rebuilding, borrow her cadence: assemble, fail, patch, laugh, repeat. Let weather and waste be teachers, not enemies. Your version might be childcare schedules, medication refills, or a weekly eldercare run. The work isn’t beneath the dream; it is the dream’s scaffolding.

If there’s a syllabus here, the dogs wrote it. Dagwood does dawn perimeter checks. Bucket, white-faced and wise, knows when to save her energy and when to dig with Banjo. Birdie is chaos with a heart—the one who army-crawls under legs to greet you and also puts her body between you and a threat. Together they reteach Brianna how to belong to a place and a pack. They are not props. They are protagonists whose instincts model a language beyond words (compare Ted Kerasote’s Merle’s Door on letting a dog be a dog).

Letting animals be animals

They drink from muddy puddles, learn cactus the hard way, develop callouses that outlast summer. Dagwood kills vermin; he loses twice to porcupines. This isn’t cruelty; it’s contact with a food web people in condos often only theorize about. City commenters rage about off-leash dogs on public lands; Madia points to 22.8 million acres of Utah’s public domain and writes as a resident, not a visitor. Her creed: love dogs like humans, treat them like dogs. Freedom and accountability. The difference isn’t legal—leash laws vary—it’s ethical: know your dogs, the terrain, and the risks you accept on their behalf.

Fostering as repair

During COVID, Underdog Rescue Moab takes in ninety-two dogs in a single day from the Diné reservation. Brianna calls to ask if she can foster despite living in a 22-foot trailer with no running water. They give her eight seven-week-old pups. She divides the trailer with a Rubbermaid lid into “the nursery” and “Dagwood’s wing,” lays pee pads, launders blankets in garbage bags, and walks the pack like ducklings in a line. She keeps the fluffy black one with the white blaze because “he looked at me like we’d met before.” Banjo becomes both comic relief and proof: adding love can lower chaos, not raise it.

The Baja parable

On a secluded Sea of Cortez beach, a naked man advances waist-deep, eyes locked, laughing when she fumbles. Birdie does not break eye contact. She grows taller and stiller. He whistles to call the dogs to him; Brianna grabs Banjo by the tail and paddles straight out to deep water with all four on the board. Back at the Airbnb, the old habit—self-blame—rears up: if only my Spanish, my vigilance, my choices. But the real lesson is boundary embodied: Birdie’s stance is the book’s thesis made muscle. Your body knows. Your pack knows. Trust them.

Key Idea

“Never leave the dogs behind” isn’t a slogan; it’s a survival ethic. Stay with the creatures and commitments that return you to yourself when fear scrambles your words.

Translate this to your life: which beings, practices, or places flip you from panic to presence? Build your routines around them. And when people online debate your ethics in the abstract, remember that ethics are lived locally—on your mesa, in your weather, with your pack.

Madia’s livelihood depends on storytelling; the crisis is that platforms don’t care about story so much as spectacle. She learns, expensively, that parasocial intimacy feels like friendship until it morphs into surveillance. “Where’s your husband?” comments bloom under old photos like mold. A snark subreddit forms; members bait her via email to harvest reactions they can mock. Brands DM sympathy and then tweet cancellations. She is, in her phrase, “hung out to dry,” left to fend for herself by people who know better—and family who should.

The loneliness of being watched

To be perpetually seen is to be perpetually misunderstood. The crowd speaks through her as if she’s transparent. The irony: she began by trying to be transparent, using Instagram as a place for essays on truth and desert living. The lesson aligns with Tolentino’s critique: platforms reward performance, not honesty, and punish complexity. You don’t fix that by becoming opaque; you fix it by becoming sovereign—deciding what, when, and how you’ll share, and refusing the commentariat’s assignment of motive.

Reclaiming narrative without reentering the cage

Her repair isn’t a Notes-app apology tour; it’s a shift in audience and aim. She writes books. She posts the truth about the accident in her voice, on her terms. She learns that silence can be as manipulative as overshare; what matters is whether speech relieves shame by aligning with reality. When Mary—the lifelong best friend with the Victorian carpet bag—flies in to help file divorce papers and asks, “Why don’t you have a toilet?”, it’s a small, private comment that lands like a bell. The internet chatter becomes background noise to real human feedback.

Boundaries you can implement

Practically, Madia’s boundaries look like: cutting off Moab acquaintances who only knew the manic version of her; not reading the last voicemail from Neil; documenting the shed build without pretending it’s easy; calling a septic truck instead of mining Reddit for solutions; leaving scenes (and people) that increase paranoia. Your translation: decide the arenas where you’re a protagonist, not a product. If you must post, write for the three people whose feedback you’d actually take.

Key Idea

You don’t owe strangers access to your wounds. Heal in rooms with doors, then choose what story crosses the threshold.

If you’ve felt flayed by online life, let Madia’s pivot guide you: reduce performative surfaces, increase durable structures (work, pets, land, friendships). The more three-dimensional your off-screen world, the less sway the two-dimensional one holds.

Madia loves Neil for eleven years. Then she learns, in a sterile room across from a powdered jelly donut hole, that the man beside her has been living parallel to her—blackouts, lies about beers, secret dents, a locked music room. A neurologist’s video later explains: memories don’t form; it takes nine months of sobriety for the brain to reboot. The knowledge helps and hurts. How do you stay when the person who did the damage cannot remember doing it?

Loving someone you can’t save

COVID shutters outpatient programs and AA. Family blame rages: “She drove him to drink!” She retreats to the desert because there, alone, she doesn’t feel alone. She fosters Birdie not as a fix but as proof that saving one thing is still possible. She makes the agonizing, ordinary choices: weekly check-ins, support groups until they close, choked-back phone calls, and finally, the separation he wants but she enacts. Her refusal is not punishment; it’s triage for a life that includes four other living beings who depend on her.

Legal severing as self-preservation

Her friend Mary plays paralegal, showing up with a lipstick, a button-down, and manila folders labeled “Include expedited filing fee check.” The divorce reads “irretrievably broken.” Practicality turns sacramental: she must file not out of spite but because if Neil kills someone with a car, creditors can take the mesa. She chooses the land—the future that keeps the dogs fed and free. It’s the least romantic sentence and the most loving one she writes.

Grief that doesn’t pretend

After his second rollover, he calls in the night. She tells him she loves him and doesn’t go to the hospital. The next morning, she sees the two-minute voicemail and never hits play. This isn’t denial; it’s boundary. To continue would be to reenter a loop that endangers everything she’s rebuilding. Dagwood, for months, runs after every white pickup. He eventually stops. It breaks her heart both times: when hope persists beyond reason, and when hope learns the truth.

Key Idea

Sometimes love is leaving. Not because you gave up, but because staying would mean abandoning the others who rely on you—including the version of you still able to love.

If addiction has touched your life, Madia’s stance offers a brutal kindness: anchor to what you can keep alive. Join support. Secure legal boundaries. Receive help. And if you must, walk—so that some part of the life you built can still be a place worth returning to, for either of you.

Six hours into driving south, Madia decides she is, in fact, headed to Mexico. She crosses at Mexicali, blasts “Mexicali Blues,” dodges an idle airplane on the roadside, and books cheap Airbnbs night to night because July empties the peninsula of tourists. At military checkpoints, AK-47s lean on truck rails; soldiers ask where she’s coming from and where she’s going; one requests a document she can’t decipher. With no service for Google Translate, she laughs; they laugh; she drives on. This is not bravado. It’s a choice to live while alive, not to hoard safety for a future that never comes.

Calculated risk vs. recklessness

She’s not naïve. She books shelter for heat, keeps the dogs leashed near roads, screens for tides in mangrove channels, and paddles to beaches no road can reach. She also accepts that dying is not the point of caution—living is. The culture’s refrain, “But what if you die?”, is answered with a more unnerving question: “What if you don’t live?” (Echoes of Cheryl Strayed’s Wild—grief transmuted into forward motion, with dogs as co-pilots.)

Reading the body’s alarms

The Baja beach encounter becomes a masterclass in somatic risk assessment. Words fail—language barrier, predator’s laughter—but the body speaks through Birdie’s posture and Brianna’s tears. The exit plan is elegant: straight out to deep water, then only later back to the car. She resists the twin traps of appeasement (“don’t be rude”) and bravado (“I can handle this”). She chooses the third way: respond to reality, not to ego.

Dogs as security system

Four dogs deter more than alarms do. They also complicate escapes (four leashes, soaked gear), which is why practice matters: her dogs know “load up,” can pivot from play to protection, and—crucially—return when called. Risk isn’t only encounter; it’s preparation. Their presence makes her less alone; her competence makes them less at risk. Together, they are a traveling organism that either stays or leaves as one.

Key Idea

Fear’s job is to ring the bell. Your job is to choose the exit that keeps everyone you love intact—even if it looks “dramatic” from the shore.

Your translation: inventory your risks (workplace, relationships, travel), pre-plan exits, and decide in advance who you’re responsible for when the bell rings. Put their names on the plan. Then go—toward what makes you feel vividly, responsibly alive.

At an estate planner’s desk in Moab, Madia stares at carpet while a stranger asks, “Who will take your dogs if you die?” The question strips away Instagram, storms, even Mexico. It names the fork: if you don’t choose to live, somebody else must break the pack. She can’t bear it. She drives home fast enough to kick up a dust plume, is tackled on the porch by four joyous bodies, and makes a private vow with public consequences: I just can’t die—not before them.

The will as mirror

Divvying property felt abstract; designating caretakers cleaves bone. Because her life isn’t built of assets; it’s built of beings. The realization collapses a season of suicidal ideation (she once bought a six-shooter in Salt Lake and held it to her temple before “chickening out”). It’s not a Hollywood epiphany; it’s an anchor set in dirt. Whatever storms return, this fact doesn’t: they cannot be separated. Therefore, she must remain.

Commitments that keep you

“Never leave the dogs behind” scales. For Brianna, it means hauling water, fixing toilets, fostering puppies, and paying loans. For you, it might be kids, community, a classroom, a clinic, a garden. You don’t have to make your life smaller to stay alive; you have to make it truer—load-bearing in the directions your love actually pulls. When Mary yells about the toilet, it isn’t about porcelain. It’s about choosing a life you can survive, not out of martyrdom, but out of belonging.

Forgiveness, then future

By the end, nothing is “fixed,” and that’s the point. Dagwood still sometimes wanders; storms still come; internet still internet. But a tone changes: from “I did all this for you” whispered into Dagwood’s fur, to “we’re gonna be okay.” Forgiveness here is practical: forgive the you who triage-lied; forgive the you who stayed too long; forgive the you who bought the gun. Then keep hauling stones. Agency isn’t a feeling; it’s the next useful thing you do in the direction of your pack.

Key Idea

Purpose can be as simple—and as sacred—as staying alive for the beings who can’t choose it for themselves.

Take this as permission to pick a reason. Name it. Tape it to the fridge. Let it shape your calendar, your budget, your boundaries, and your plans for severe weather. Your life becomes livable not when pain disappears, but when the pull toward the future outweighs the undertow of the past.