Broke and wanting a dog, she fostered her way into a different life

Doges Editorial · 2026-05-25 · 6 min read

At 25, Isabel Klee started fostering dogs because she couldn't afford to adopt one. A decade and 35 dogs later, she's written a memoir about what she actually learned — about grief, failure, and the dog who became her anchor.

Isabel Klee will tell you, without embarrassment, that her fostering career did not begin with altruism. She was 25 years old, living in New York City, and she wanted a dog she couldn't afford. What happened next — over the course of roughly a decade and 35 foster dogs — became a memoir, a platform, and something she still can't entirely explain.

The Honest Origin Story

I would love to say I did it out of the goodness of my heart and to relieve shelters of their overpopulation crisis, but I really just did it because I was broke and wanted a dog of my own.

— Isabel Klee, author and foster caregiver

Fostering felt like a workaround. A foster dog could live in her apartment without the financial commitment of ownership; she'd care for the animal, help it transition to a permanent home, and then do it again. She didn't expect it to become the organizing principle of her adult life, or to produce a book that asks harder questions about rescue than most feel-good dog narratives are willing to ask.

"Dogs, Boys, And Other Things I've Cried About," published by HarperCollins, is that book. It covers eight years of fostering through the honest lens of someone who loved the work and was also, at various points, broken by it — and who found, over time, that both of those things could be true at once.

Simon

The dog who changed everything was a Jindo mix named Simon. He arrived as a foster and never left. He's epileptic, requires careful daily management, and has been — by Klee's own accounting — the one constant in her adult life through more upheaval than she can easily catalogue. Her TikTok account, @simonsits, which now reaches more than a million followers, is named for him.

She dedicated the memoir to him: "For my Simon: Thank you for everything. I promise I will be repaying you every day of your life for being the one constant in mine." The dedication doesn't oversell what Simon did for her. It simply names it, with the specificity of someone who has thought about it carefully and settled on those exact words.

But I remember waking up one morning and just realizing that I cannot give this dog to somebody else. I had not felt that way before that. And I had not felt that way since then with any of my foster dogs.

— Isabel Klee

The Part the Algorithm Doesn't Show

Klee's TikTok feed is warm and funny and deeply invested in each dog's story. What the memoir does is expand the frame — to show the dogs she couldn't help, the grief she couldn't adequately explain to people who weren't dog people, and the specific weight of failing publicly in front of an audience that believes in you.

Zero was one of those dogs. An elderly dog with dementia who had no one to be with him at the end, Klee adopted him specifically so he wouldn't die alone. He passed last December. She was there. The account of it in the memoir doesn't moralize or offer comfort — it just describes what it was like to choose to be present for that, and what it cost.

I felt like I failed him and my audience who really believes in me. Sometimes the reality of the situation is that you can't help every dog. And this dog, it was his time.

— Isabel Klee

The Dog She Has Now

At the time of the memoir's publication, Klee was fostering Gracie — a blind, diabetic gray Chihuahua mix who had been waiting for a placement for four months. Gracie requires twice-daily insulin injections. She cannot see. She has been passed over by every potential adopter who has met her, for reasons that are depressingly legible.

Klee takes Gracie to events, films her for TikTok, and advocates for her placement with the same energy she brings to every dog. The work of fostering, she has come to understand, is inseparable from the work of attention — making an overlooked animal visible, showing the world what they might otherwise scroll past, and staying patient with the pace at which the right person finds the right dog.

What's changed, over eight years of doing this publicly, is scale. A dog who might once have sat in a shelter for months with no one advocating loudly for her now has a potential audience of a million people. That reach doesn't guarantee a placement — Gracie's four months waiting proves that — but it changes the odds, and it changes the conversation about which dogs are adoptable and which ones are considered too complicated to bother with.

The Grief That Doesn't Get Named

Foster caregivers occupy a strange emotional position. They do the hardest early work — medical care, socialization, trust-building with an animal that may have good reasons not to trust — and then hand that animal to someone else. They grieve privately, in an experience that the people around them often don't quite understand. There's no ceremony for it. The dog just leaves.

Klee's memoir names that grief with unusual precision. It also names what Zero gave her at the end: the experience of loving something without any expectation of return, of being present with an animal in its final hours simply because she chose to be there. That kind of love is not diminished by its brevity.

It was beautiful that I barely knew this dog, but I loved him. And I got to be there in his final moments and finally see him at peace.

— Isabel Klee

A Decade of Dogs

Thirty-five dogs across roughly eight years. Each one arriving with a different history, different fears, different ways of communicating distrust or curiosity or something that eventually looked like trust. Klee has been, in turn, a nurse, a translator, an advocate, and a grief-holder — often all four at once, for the same dog.

The memoir is careful not to romanticize any of it. Fostering is hard in ways that don't make good content: the sleepless nights with a medically fragile dog, the guilt when a placement falls through, the particular loneliness of grieving an animal that wasn't technically yours. Klee writes about all of it, with the directness of someone who has stopped trying to make the story neater than it is.

She started because she was broke and wanted a dog. She ended up with something harder to name: a practice of showing up for animals that need someone, even when the showing up costs more than she expected. Simon is still there. Gracie is waiting. The next foster is already somewhere — in a shelter hallway or an intake form — not yet knowing her name.