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On Cat Ladies: A Plea
Friends, Ricochet, Countrymen! I realize that there are a number of important things happening in America and across the world right now, and that what I’m about to share with you isn’t topical. I further realize that I promised to sort out the nature of the Good and the Beautiful and then to write the definitive guide to our foreign policy and keep you posted. But before I do that — and I will, cross my heart! — one Really Important Thing occurred to me.
Some time ago, a well-reputed literary agent contacted me (yes, every writer’s dream), and asked me if I’d like to write a book. Great, right? Except the book he had in mind was one I just couldn’t figure out how to write. His vision was a book about the history of cat ladies. Why he thought of me in this context is obvious. Why he thought this could be a commercial winner is also obvious. Was I willing? You bet. A job is a job and work is work, and if someone wants to pay me to write, I really don’t need the narcissistic satisfaction of writing about something elevated anywhere near as much as I need the money.
But the problem was this: as far as I could tell — and, believe me, I looked — there’s no history of cat ladies to write about. I mean, I could stretch, a lot, and maybe find some obscure paper in an even more obscure journal indicating that archeologists have discovered the remains of a Cro-Magnon female in close proximity to some remnant that looks digitigrade; and maybe I could dig up a touching anecdote involving a medieval nun, a cat named Aethelburh, and some drama (although when I think “nun, medieval, drama, interesting,” my mind reaches for Abelard, not Aethelburh, and not Abelard the Celtic Shorthair, either, if you get my drift).
Maybe I could say something about the Cat Ladies of the Korean War — and how this is actually way more interesting than, say, the part about blowing up the bridges over the Yalu — except I do not in fact know that cat ladies played any role whatsoever in the Korean War, and just don’t see how they could possibly be more interesting, no matter how much artistry and skill I apply to evoking them, than “blowing things up.”
Cats are great. I love cats. Cats are cute. Cats sell. Cats are one of my favorite things, if not my very favorite; I’ve got one right now sitting on my shoulder as I type this, threatening to hop from there to the floor via my keyboard, making me lose this post in some unrecoverable way; I still won’t even have it in me to be cross with her if she does, she’s that cute.
But one of the best things about cats — they do not have the power of speech — also makes them the worst things possible if you’re trying to write some kind of history involving them. They leave no written records. They don’t even pay taxes, no less write memoirs. No one has any idea what an eighteenth-century cat might have had to say for itself, though I reckon it’s pretty much what a contemporary cat would, which is to say, nothing.
As for the women, I figure that this has probably been pretty constant through history. Women like cats, as a rule, and you could get a little, maybe, out of some obvious observations about cats being about the size of a baby and having certain obvious aspects of facial morphology that maybe make women confuse them with babies, but this is about a sentence’s worth of insight. And you just read it. I just don’t think I can get from that to a book.
This troubles me greatly, though, because when a well-reputed agent calls you out of the blue and says, “I see ‘bestseller’ in your future if you can just do this one thing,” and especially if it happens to be true that no one could be better qualified than you to write a history of cat ladies, should such a thing be possible — I mean, historian, check; writer, check; cat lady, check. What else? Who else? No one, right? — you do rather feel that you’re a damned fool if you don’t find some way to do it. Especially if you need the money, which is probably the most relevant point.
So I keep thinking, “Just solve this and it’s money in the bank and cat food in the bowl.” And yet I keep coming back to the same problem: There’s a reason no one’s written a history of cat ladies before.
Then again, this guy made a bestseller out of salt. Salt doesn’t have much to say for itself, either, though I might have had the sense to think, even before I knew the formula, “salt equals bestseller,” that yes, there’s a lot to say about salt; but maybe I wouldn’t have. And while cat ladies may not lend themselves to the same kinds of discussion (trade, currencies, chemistry, wars, tastes good on lots of stuff) or be appealing to the same set of reviewers (the kind who amuse themselves much more than they should by describing a book about salt as “sprinkled” with anecdotes), that doesn’t mean there’s not something there, does it?
What is it, though? Can you think of it?
Published in General
Maybe I need to pick up the phone and speak to the agent in question again. I did have a conversation with him something to this effect–that the book would have to be something of a smaller book. That there may in fact be no big book here. He made it pretty clear that his vision is “big book,” as in, the definitive book on the subject, and something fairly serious at that–not that levity is forbidden, obviously. But perhaps I took that advice too far–to the point of really over-thinking it.
A Forrest Gumpish romp? Ladies & their cats forging world events, yet escaping history’s chronicles somehow? ‘The Truth About Cat Ladies.’
Historical fiction
Not me. I’m a dog person.
I have that one too. Love it.
Claire,
Not sure this will help, but I can’t pass up the opportunity to tell the story any chance I get.
When I met my wife, we had two things we bonded over almost immediately, the love of the BBC show Keeping up Appearances, and cats (She had one and I had two). My now-wife had just had formal portraits done of her with her cat Bundles. She was showing them around the microbrewery where she worked and I hung out. I found out that she was no longer engaged (she had been when we first met), and I wasted little time in asking her out.
When I showed up to pick her up for our first date, I showed up with flowers for her and a catnip filled toy for Bundles. I knew if Bundles didn’t like me, I didn’t stand a chance. Luckily he did and its been happily ever after.
At the significant risk of stating the obvious: talk to your father.
Someone, possibly himself, persuaded him to write A Tour of the Calculus. When you consider the history of that subject in enough depth to do it justice—covering everything from Zeno to Weierstrass—the surprise is that it’s as slender as it is. But I suspect most readers are even more surprised to find it’s really about the people behind the calculus, and their philosophies, and their disagreements and battles. It ends up being fascinating, I think, whether your interest is in the mathematics (beyond merely “how do I solve this problem?” at any rate) or in the history of its development or in its philosophy, which is inescapably human.
I would also add that if you can write a Thatcher biography composed entirely of vignettes in the form of conversations with her friends and enemies, and trust that whatever narrative structure might exist will emerge organically given the very simple, general frame of “why a woman, and why this woman in particular?” then you can do something very similar for the history of the Cat Lady. You won’t know—you can’t know—what the arc will be ahead of time. You’ll just have to find references left by cats’, and Cat Ladies’, friends and enemies, sit in the cross-talk, and find out what strikes you. And yes, your judgment about what’s striking is essentially guaranteed to be more interesting than that of anyone else I can think of.
Claire–
A few thoughts and observations on Cat Ladies. I think there’s a good short book here, approached correctly. I hesitate to say that cats were ever really domesticated, but they co-evolved along with humans. With the rise of agriculture came the storing of grain, which was a bonanza for mice. Cats controlled the mice in places like Egypt, where famine was rarely far off, which is possibly why they were worshiped. Places that banned cats as pets also got some unexpected surprises, like rat infestations. (Paul Johnson, I think, once wrote how the greatest beneficiary of Marxist mismanagement was the mouse, which frequently got grain intended for Soviet and Chinese peasants. These regimes, which thought of cats as a bourgeois trinket, banned the keeping of pets, which probably made the famine worse.)
As human society changed, however, so did cats. We once kept them around because they did useful work. Now cats are becoming the children some people (mostly but not entirely women) never had. Further, thanks to T. gondii, cats might be making people mentally ill. The story of cats and people is the story of how civilization has changed.
If you want to make money, forget about the ladies. Depict famous historical events by photographing cats dressed up in period costumes. (Though I’m guessing that someone has done that already.) Cats, ladies, history — pick any two.
The catnip toy is definitely the right thing to have in hand when courting a cat lady. The flowers? Maybe not. A cat lady’s first response, at least internally, will be, “Are those things toxic to cats?” She’ll be wondering because she knows full well that whether or not they are, they will soon be eaten by the cats. Then barfed up on the rug.
But it sounds as if, perhaps, you had the wisdom to bring roses or daisies. Those are fine (if not destined to last more than a few minutes between the lady’s display of gratitude and that characteristic yackety-yack-yack sound, the one that means you better grab the paper towels and rush to redirect the upchucker-in-prospect away from the carpet and toward the linoleum). Guy shows up at my place with tulips or lilies, though, that’s an awkward moment. No woman wants to look unappreciative of a romantic gesture. But there ain’t nothing romantic about a dead cat.
‘Depict famous historical events by photographing cats dressed up in period costumes. ‘
My friend, illustrator Christina Hess >>> http://www.christinahess.com/
Claire, there is nothing worse than the dreaded sound of heaving with its attendant “blechhhhh.”
Also, check out the Catropolitan Opera: http://www.amazon.com/The-Catropolitan-Opera-Centenary-Celebration/dp/0821224352
I think it is premature to try to figure out what a book will be about until you know more about the subject in question. Now you may have plenty of personal experience about being a cat lady, but that isn’t the only place to start. Here is where I would begin.
Where does the term “Cat Lady” come from. All such popular phrases and concepts have a historical origin. Who was the first Cat Lady? It had to be someone, whether fictional or real. I think your goal should be in some ways to start with yourself and go back as far as you can go with historical evidence and chronicle who were the famous cat ladies. The people who breathed life and meaning into this now linguistic archetype.
You are thinking of writing this book as a summary of what is known, but like you point out nothing has been written about this. You, my good writer, are solving a mystery, the mystery of the “Cat Lady”. Who is she and where does she come from? The best historical questions aren’t the ones that have been asked but the ones that nobody has asked before. The information is out there and if you dig far enough you will find out.
I have no idea how long this book will be, but how can you know before you even start researching?
Really this book can be as much about the process of figuring out who the “Cat Lady” is as who she actually is. The Cat Lady is the hook, but the meat and potatoes can be the journey. Who knows maybe it will lead back to Cleopatra or some ancient Egyptian priestess. That possibility is what makes the book worth reading.
My wife keeps a list in her head of all the plants, foods, etc toxic to cats. The flowers were daisies. (First date).
On the subject of cats barfing up, I’ve now become so trained by the cats that at the first moment I hear the sounds, I’m up and have the paper towels in hand. The response is positively Pavlovian. (Wait a minute, does that mean I am the dog in the house? Hmm, I may have to think about that.)
Any money you’ve taken from your agent / editor / publisher for this crazy idea, send it back. I don’t see a book coming out of this. Maybe a pamphlet. Obviously a longish Ricochet post. But not a book.
Maybe the huge sense of gratitude and relief I felt on reading this comment is … telling me something important.
Thank you.
I was curious so I tried a google search. Is it this woman: Florence Maybrick ?
A few years ago I benefitted from the help of cat ladies. You see, we’d just put down our beloved outdoor cat and many strays began invading our yard. One stray was a skittish female kitten. Older daughter befriended her. A few months passed & there were 5 kittens giving us 7 cats. A nightmare. Our vet fixed mamma for $350. A catlady I met at a cat adoption told me about a vet who fixes cats very inexpensively. I got 5 kittens flexed for about the same price as mamma.
But here’s what struck me. There are women who know where the different stray cat colonies are in town. They know the cheapest vets. They feed these cats and give them shots. Some chain pet stores give them food and provide space for adoptions. These women are passionate about cat adoption. I had no clue about this sub culture.
Since Claire is a quitter, dibs on my idea!
Claire,
How about a collection of Cat short stories. You could be the editor or write your own. You could even ask Ricochet to write them and submit them to you as the editor. Do to my last encounter with you, I am at work on a piece about pure aesthetics. (GG gives me homework, you give me inspiration.) I don’t think I’d be up to short story writing right now. I did have two interesting cats when I was much younger.
You could say they were as different as man and woman.
Sally Kansas: I went to the humane society. Odd name for a institution that kills strays. She was the runt of the litter and obviously not selling. She was the smallest Calico you’ve ever seen. She was even smaller when I picked her up as she weighed almost nothing, she was all fur. I had her when I was a traveling instrument sales engineer. I would take her with me on my bi-monthly 1,500 mile trip to cover the territory. We made sales calls on the greatest technical industrial firms in the world. I’d take her right to corporate research, our favorite hang out. Sally’s contribution was to sink her claws into the back of my neck while we rode down the interstate to the next sales call. I got an oversized cat travel box (not hard considering how small she was) with a cage front so she could watch the scenery. One of her other talents was fur balls. I think she held the record for throwing up a fur ball larger than she was. To say she was cute was the understatement of the millennium.
Jack the Cat: Jack was a stray. He camped out under my parents cottage at the lake. Jack looked very much like a small mountain lion. Long, lean, and tan. Jack immediately took to fetching like a dog would. I would throw something across the room and he would bound over to it and leap on it like prey. He would pick it up in his mouth and carry it back to me and drop it at my feet. He’d sit there intensely with his tail twitching waiting for me to throw it again, which I would over and over again until I got bored. One night a storm blew up. I opened the apartment door to get something in out of the rain and Jack ran past me out the door. It was a nasty storm, the wind, the rain, and the lighting were fearsome. I ran out after him. He hid behind a bush frightened by a lightning strike. I reached down to get him and he sunk his teeth into my hand. I was getting very wet and was in no mood to dally. I clamped my fist over his jaw and carried him back into the apartment that way. Upon entry I tossed him across the room to extract him from my bleeding hand. Needless to say, Jack wasn’t all that cute but he was a lot of fun.
Well, perhaps that will get you started. Actually, I had hoped you’d taken my advice and gone to work on a book about female chief executives in war situations, Mrs. Thatcher being the exemplar.
One last thought. Somebody mentioned mice and the cat’s utility in catching them. I want to say that mice are much maligned. They have feelings too.
Regards,
Jim
If you don’t see it, or don’t want to do it, then don’t do it. But there are worse things in life than doing something for the money. I have a side project—a Software-as-a-Service project—that I’m spending a minimum of an hour per day on. It’s not glamorous, but if I can get it done, launch it, and get even a few users, it will represent some IP that I should be able to sell to someone who actually wants to run it every day, expand on it, and hopefully reap much larger rewards than what I hope to sell it for. And that’s why I’m doing it: because I need, at my age, to do something to make what as an individual is a lot of money, but as even a tiny little dot-com startup is not, because my retirement planning up to this point has sucked. There are certainly aspects of it I’m enjoying along the way, but let’s not kid ourselves: I wouldn’t be doing it if I didn’t think it could represent a big chunk of, or even all of, what I would need in order to live off the interest for the rest of my life.
If a Claire Berlinski book presenting—nay, defining—the history of the Cat Lady let you live financially worry-free in Paris for, say, a year while you worked on something whose content came more readily to you, was more elevated, or whatever, I would call that an amazing trade that I would recommend accepting in a heartbeat. But if all it would do would be to take that year’s worth of stress and compress it down into whatever the deadline(s) for the book are, yeah, pass.
A possible title: Women and Cats – an abiding connection
When was the first woman-cat interaction described? In the Bible? In the Greek myths? In Ancient Egypt? Haroon al Rashid’s Baghdad? What about during the French Revolution?
And what is the common thread that ties these together? Given the woman-cat connection preserved in popular culture and folk lore (Cat Ladies are just on the extreme end of the scale) it’s worth asking – what is the connection? why does it endure?
My late friend Katelou (a cat lady herself) used to say that women are like cats. Two of them meet, and they take one look at each other and decide whether they’re going to be friends or not. If not, whatever happens, they never will be. Does this happen when a woman and a cat meet too? It certainly seems more a relationship of equals (cats being generous) than interactions between humans and dogs, or humans and horses, are.
When a cat sets eyes on a woman he thinks “she has a can opener and I love her.”
What’s interesting is that in the West the crazy cat lady is a familiar, negative stereotype. Dogs are viewed as being the pinnacle of animal companionship. In the Middle East, however, it’s quite the opposite. Dogs are seen as dirty, dumb animals, and they are rarely kept as pets. Cats are the pet of choice, making the crazy cat lady image a Western concept.
wow, you’ve got that right! search “literary agent” and you get a pretty daunting haystack.
as for the cats… sorry, I’m a dog person. good luck!
GG, Casey, et al.–don’t worry, I am not a quitter and I totally get that “doing something you don’t really want to do in exchange for money” is not only a reasonable idea but a great one, if you propose to be the kind of person I like to think I am, i.e., a person in reasonably good contact with the Reality Principle and the moral value of “working for a living.”
I just thought the insight, “I don’t want to do this” is helpful, because it got me away from the idea, “The problem is there’s nothing to say” and toward the idea, “The problem is that you feel deep-down entitled, despite your protests, to think and write only about things that really, really, really interest you and get paid for it.”
That’s what Spin’s comment told me–it sounded like “permission to give up,” and I really loved that, which in turn told me–within only a few seconds, in fact–“Claire, don’t be lazy and don’t be a loser.” I didn’t make the last part of the chain of thought explicit, though obviously, I should have.
The other thing this whole thread has shown me–for which I am so truly grateful, and thank you all–is that part of my resistance to this has been a half-conscious (but now fully-conscious) suspicion that Agent Well-Reputed has in mind a book that will make me spend lots of time thinking about things that seriously bore me–all that “angsty-lonely-modern women and their neuroses” stuff that so many people think worth spending serious time thinking about, but which I most certainly do not.
However, now that this idea is fully-conscious, I realize that no, he did not say this, and that yes, it is entirely possible to write such a book without submerging myself in stuff that I think is a both a total waste of time and an unhealthy cultural preoccupation, generally, not to mention an unpleasant set of questions to consider about my own life, personally, not to mention questions that even were I to consider them deeply, would hardly wish to discuss with the public at large.
Now that I’ve firmly ruled out going down that path, in my mind, I find myself less resistant to the idea. And suspect, therefore, that I’ll be able to solve the rest of the problem.
Thank you, Ricochet!
Other creatures have decided they love me for reasons even less worthy, so that’s cool.
Parenthetically, Ricochet, I salute you all for resisting the temptation to make even one joke of the obvious kind, or even alluding to it. As a lady, I am most relieved, for I was dreading the prospect of yet again fainting, shaming, and scolding.
I have often found that cats are a handy stand-in for a real relationship with real-life guy.
You know how cats like to park themselves wherever you happen to need some clear space – like on a book you are reading, or across your keyboard? They do that to relationships, too.
We once gave a kitten to a single friend who was dating a good man. He very much wanted to marry her, and she was interested. But once the kitten arrived, she dumped the man, and has never married. It looks likely that she never will.
As one of my kids said at the time: “We should NEVER have given her the kitty.” I regret it. They would have been a great couple.
My rule of thumb is that any single woman is marriageable up to the point where she becomes a cat lady. The cat becomes a relationship pacifier.
So why did you feel you had to bring it up?