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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
Why are you being sexist? I have a male friend who is a “cat man.” He has nine or ten cats in his house and goes out every evening to feed the strays, spending a considerable amount of his money to do it. It goes without saying he is not married…lol.
Don’t cats figure prominently in black magic and those sorts of things? Could witches be the original cat ladies? Also, isn’t there something about cats and ancient Egypt? Maybe Cleopatra was a cat lady. Seems like there is some info there for you to mine.
Have you considered taking the idea more meta? Perhaps a history of the representation of cat ladies in pop culture? That would also allow you to pad the book with quotes, transcripts, photos, etc. And it would attract readers who like pop culture — fans of The Simpsons, 30 Rock, etc., etc.
It is true that cats don’t talk or leave memoirs. I don’t know if cat ladies leave memoirs either, but they do talk. So maybe the book should be more about the ladies than the cats. I can think of a few ways to do this. One would be to select some cat ladies and focus on their stories. Along the way would come insights, maybe more than the one offered, about why cats and ladies are such a notorious combo. I’m thinking that in addition to the children angle, it could be something to do with the particular nature of cats and their independent and aloof, yet affectionate and endearing ways. Actually, they are remarkably like teenagers who can’t talk back, come to think of it. That in itself if pretty appealing–at least the can’t-talk-back part. Why does this appeal so much to some women? I think that is an interesting question. So you could go with the psychology angle. Or it could be more of a comic treatment with some insights thrown in. Maybe this says something about me, but I do think it is an interesting subject. What makes Cat Ladies tick? Why do they keep turning up? Are they cross-cultural? Why not dog ladies? Or do they exist in the same numbers as cat ladies, but without the venerated title?
Find old photos of ladies with cats then write up little wonderings about the photo. Tie it into time and place. Maybe she was doing this or feeling that.
Big Catnip is getting in front of some brewing scandal.
History. Photos. History did not start when photography began. Apart from that, yeah–except that’s called fiction, of course. Not that I’m rejecting any idea out of hand.
When actual history is hard to come by or is unsuited to your agenda (earning money, in this case), write fiction. The Left does it all the time.
I can see it now — Great Cat Ladies Through the Ages. Or maybe, Cats of Great Ladies Through the Ages.
Did Margaret Thatcher have cats? No? She should have. You can fix that, dear Claire.
I went through all of those ideas, actually. And they’re all “sort of good.” Witches, familiars, Egypt (Bastet’s the one you’re thinking about, mercifully not Isis, which at this point would be a serious branding problem), cat gods, cat lore, all of it sort of cat-history-lady related, but honestly none of it so interesting that I could really say to myself, “I can make this into something people won’t be able to put down, and is somehow related to what people think of when they think of the phrase ‘cat lady.'” I mean, as evidence, try this: Look up Bastet on the Internet and tell me how quickly you get bored. Bet you it’s fast. Doesn’t mean a good writer couldn’t somehow solve that problem, but it needs, as the marketing people would say, “added-value.” What is it?
You have not studied my book about her with sufficient care. I expect my readers to memorize it. I am sure you have it on your shelf, do you not? Several copies, in fact? Of course you do. Go to the epilogue.
Yeah, I thought “meta,” too. I even ran that past the agent in question. Kind of a “let’s take out the history” version, and more a “let’s think about the way we think of cat ladies now” concept. Which could in principle be larded up with a lot of the sort of things people like to read about women-these-days and how confused we all are about being women and having children and having it all and having careers and leaning-in or leaning-out and being lean and what-has-feminism-wrought and whatever else seems always to be “most read” on the Atlantic. All sort of with, you know, cats wandering on and off the stage. But he didn’t bite on that. (And honestly, I wouldn’t buy that book myself, because I always find that kind of stuff incredibly boring, but that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t do it for money and try to figure out some way to make it interesting.) But no, that wasn’t what he wanted. He wanted a history. The definitive one, at that.
Maybe it is. What am I missing here, though? What needs to be explained about why “can’t talk back” is appealing? (And can anyone here with a straight face tell me that this quality, inherently, is more appealing to women than men?)
Too bad you’re not a lefty, Claire. Then you could just make up history.
‘Cause someone said “cat lady” to me and dangled money in front of my face. If someone tells me there’s money to be made out of “cat guy,” believe me, I’d be just as interested. In the money, anyway. Which is probably part of the problem: I guess I don’t deep down believe that cats and ladies are so obviously more of a thing than cats and gentlemen that there’s some deep and important reason to pair the words “cat” and “lady,” no less a historical one. Everyone likes cats, right? Or so the Internet tells us.
History didn’t begin with Margaret Thatcher either. But you gotta start somewhere.
Just pulled this from a quick search. This is a real woman from a real place with a real cat. Of course, you won’t know much about this exact woman but can construct a likely history of a woman like her in that time and place. Photo on the left, history on the right.
Start with a photo of a little girl with a cat and work up to this. Times change but cats are a constant companion.
Well, just as a thought exercise, a creativity-stimulator, what if I were. Not a leftist, necessarily, but just allowed to make this up. Assume some connection to the known history of humanity and cats. But let’s make up the rest. What would that look like? What would get you to say, “Yeah, wow, fascinating, I’d buy that?”
We’re all stuck on the smell of the handbag.
Great photo. I don’t know if I’d buy a book about her, but I’d retweet it.
Okay, you’re forgiven.
We didn’t buy The Gallery of Regrettable Food to see pictures of meat. We bought it to read what Lileks said about pictures of meat.
Perhaps you could examine the unfair maligning of “cat ladies” in our society, and the stereotypes they endure. Are there not also “dog ladies” that are similarly unmarried and obsessed with their pets? They do not suffer the same hate and degradation that “cat ladies” do. There should be a treatise on the unjust treatment of “cat ladies.” You should call for the community leaders to fight for “cat lady” rights and employment quotas. You could express the need for “cat ladies” to become a protected class- they have basic human rights too, gosh darn-it! Maybe December can be “cat lady awareness month” or “cat lady history month.”
Speaking of cats…
There was, I recall reading about this but cannot remember the name, an American woman (probably an heiress) who fell in love with an married an English Cad, who was taking Strychnine to maintain the extraordinarily high level of Tom Catting he’d grown accustomed to.
He overdosed, and she was accused of soaking fly paper to extract the Strychnine (a long process, given the low dosage in the fly paper) to poison him. She was convicted, sentenced to be hanged, but pardoned by Queen Victoria after a public campaign.
She returned to her home outside of Boston and became a Cat Lady, beloved by the boys of a local school, who, the story goes, were her pall bearers at her funeral.
But I forget the name. It’s probably buried in a larger, seensational book, with lots of other stories and names.
Have you given a thought to why there are so many Cat Ladies today, and the sociological implications of this phenomenon, if it indeed is a phenomenon?
As I write this I sit under a picture of an Amish girl holding a white cat. I think it’s a Wyeth- but which Wyeth I could not tell you. Anyway, Cat ladies across cultures certainly has some appeal.
How about Cat Ladies Aren’t Crazy for a title and then cover a broad range of subjects – like your challenges in putting together a history, photos and comments (love Casey’s pics across the lifespan), thoughts on why cats make great companions, and maybe some interviews with current cat ladies aided by your own reflections?
There’s lots there, and you’re the woman to get paid to write it!
I’ll bet there are plenty of pre-written books about hoarding. Just pull a Fareed Zakaria and re-write one, substituting “cats” for “old newspapers” where appropriate.
You bet I’ve thought about it–I mean, surely that’s the selling point deep down, right? That somehow we have the phrase “cat lady,” and that must mean something, and maybe it has something to do with all the usual culprits–urbanization, breakdown of traditional families, confused women, men who are confused about women, etc. etc.
So, that’s one paragraph down. Maybe the rest can be cute photos?
Think of the book not as scholarship per se, but as solid cultural journalism. The book doesn’t have to have tons of text or constitute the ultimate exposé on cats. It just has to have some good, bouncy text and lots of photos of cats. What you’ve uncovered already, it seems to me, is an excellent foundation upon which to seek out more. Dig up more stories. Write your impressions of them. Weave it all into a breezy coherent narrative sprung whole-cloth from both your situation as a writer and your vast experience with feline company. As long as you are forthright about what you see as the limits of the book’s purpose and extent (which your post indicates you can do wonderfully well), there’s no harm done and certainly no foul. I’m being completely truthful when I say it’s something I’d pick up in a bookstore and seriously consider buying.
Fifty shades of calico.
Whoa, that’s meta. And maybe a little too much “me.” “Me” is a subject that I of course find fascinating, but have noticed in life that it is a grave mistake–for most writers–to assume that a fascination with oneself will be widely shared.
With you on “I’m the woman to get paid to write it.” Not so sure on “lots there.” But maybe that’s the point–rarely does anyone get paid a lot to do something easy. Writing something (good) about nothing (or little) is surprisingly hard.
Not impossible, however. So I guess I should just keep working.