Come, Let Me Guide You : A Life Shared with a Guide Dog

Come, Let Me Guide You explores the intimate communication between author Susan Krieger and her guide dog Teela over the 10-year span of their working life together.

This is a book about being led by a dog to new places in the world and new places in the self, a book about facing life's challenges outwardly and within, and about reading those clues―those deeply felt signals―that can help guide the way. It is also, more broadly, about the importance of intimate connection in human-animal relationships, academic work, and personal life.

In her previous book, Traveling Blind: Adventures in Vision with a Guide Dog by My Side, Krieger focused on her first two years with Teela, her lively Golden Retriever-Yellow Labrador. Come, Let Me Guide You continues the narrative, beginning at the moment the author must confront Teela's retirement and then reflecting on the span of their relationship. These emotionally moving stories offer the reader personal entrée into a life of increasing pleasure and insight as Krieger describes how her relationship with her guide dog has had far-reaching effects, not only on her abilities to navigate the world while blind, but also on her writing and teaching, her ability to face loss, and her sense of self.

Come, Let Me Guide You is an invaluable contribution to the literature on human-animal communication and on the guide-dog-human experience, as well as to disability and feminist ethnographic studies. It shows how a relationship with a guide dog is unique among bonds, for it rests upon highly regulated connections yet touches deep emotional chords. For Krieger, those chords have resulted in these memorable stories, often humorous and playful, always instructive, and generative of broader insight.

Susan Krieger, a sociologist and writer, teaches in the Program in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Stanford University. She is the author of six previously published books: Traveling Blind: Adventures in Vision with a Guide Dog by My Side (Purdue University Press, 2010), Things No Longer There: A Memoir of Losing Sight and Finding Vision (University of Wisconsin Press, 2005), The Family Silver: Essays on Relationships Among Women (University of California Press, 1996), Social Science and the Self: Personal Essays on an Art Form (Rutgers University Press, 1991), The Mirror Dance: Identity in a Women's Community (Temple University Press, 1983), and Hip Capitalism (Sage Publications, 1979).