Myles also raises the hilarious and sobering notion of the dog as ghostwriter: “Dog is travelling through you. She is even the purported author/posthumous editor of a delightful chapter in which she reveals her low opinion of Myles’s earlier writing efforts: “ Afterglow is totally a book with legs (four if I can be dumb) so it will go a lot further than your earlier Eileen-based fictions.”

Rum and random non-sequiturs flourish throughout (there is an academic footnote, on the toothlessness of Native Americans) and Rosie links all the eccentric synapses – she is regularly sighted and cited.

This is not a dog elegy that, on the whole, tugs at the heart strings (and I am sorry about that), although its ending is comically moving, in its quaint way, as Myles scatters Rosie’s ashes into green water and the powder just kind of sits on a rock and refuses to disappear: “C’mon, swim baby,” Myles says. Myles, who started as a poet and performance artist in New York City, is now a professor in San Diego and is billed as a “queer feminist literary icon”, lets her imagination off the lead and feels no need to make runaway thoughts come to heel. But Rosie’s end turns out not to be an ending and her afterlife is in playful hands. We read early on about Rosie’s last trip to the vet aged 15 (and her last supper: carne asada). The dog is Rosie – a stolid, black-and-white pit bull terrier chosen by Myles from a New York street litter. But Eileen Myles’s Afterglow belongs in a strange category of its own – it is unlike anything I have read and is a work of Joycean ambition in comparison with, say, John Grogan’s popular bestseller Marley and Me. Even Virginia Woolf wrote a book about a dog: Flush (which is also a semi-fictional biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning although, admittedly, not one of her best). But some of the best memoirs I have read have been about dogs: JR Ackerley’s indispensable We Think the World of You soothed my broken heart as a teenager after a beloved dog had died, and Paul Bailey’s A Dog’s Life is a splendid memoir about the collie cross that took over his and his partner’s life. Y ou may think, at least if you are not a dog lover, that the dog memoir is for a niche, non-literary readership.

Afterglow by Eileen Myles