Kam
Oh but this got me in some VERY soft places, it really did. I don’t know what I was expecting, but getting teary-eyed once every chapter was certainly NOT it. (This is a compliment, btw.)
I found it interesting how the author anchored aspects of her life story to some of the notable cats she rescued and cared for after she and her partner moved into their house in Poets Square. There are many themes discussed in this memoir - feminism in the context of animal welfare; the economic pressures of having to survive in the United States; the knock-on effects of mental illness on one’s life - but the way they’re framed, grounded in the story of a cat that the author has cared for, brings a kind of immediacy to the storytelling that can definitely bring on the waterworks for some readers (as it certainly did for me).
While the cats certainly are important to the stories told in this memoir, the people are just as important. My personal favorite story - and one of the ones that I think deserves the most attention - was the story of the Desert Palms cat colony. The cats might have been the reason that brought the author to that place, but I like how she focused more on the poverty-stricken, homeless individuals who lived in the area. Like the cats, they, too, were suffering - but unlike the cats, people were always so willing to offer them the empathy and help they so desperately needed. The author was right to point out that wherever cats suffer, there are people suffering too: she makes this clear by pointing out that there are no feral cats in upper class neighborhoods, while there are great numbers of them in lower class neighborhoods. Both cats and people suffer under systemic oppression and injustice, but only cats are deemed worthy of unquestioning compassion. It all boils down to the puritanical view of suffering as divine punishment that feels so damn AMERICAN at times: cats don’t “deserve” to suffer, because they are animals and therefore innocent. People, on the other hand, are sinful creatures, and so therefore if a person suffers, they must have done something to “deserve” it.
This leads me to another point about this memoir: it does not attempt to sugarcoat how hard working in animal welfare in general and cat rescue in particular can be. The author does not stint in describing how she manages her grief; how she has to confront situations where she will find dead kittens, dead cats; and how, so often, cats will inevitably just die in the vet clinic or even before she can even get to their location to rescue them. She says she knows all the ways a cat can suffer, all the ways an animal can suffer - but crucially, she does not claim it makes her a better person. Suffering is not something that will make one stronger; it just compounds and compounds until one does not want to face the world again. But inevitably, she says, one must do so, because that’s how life works. One must keep going - for the cats, certainly, but for the people around oneself, too.
Of course, being able to keep going with life would be much easier if one had the ability to mitigate the rest of life’s difficulties, which means: money. Not necessarily billionaire levels of it, but enough to support the exigencies and contingencies of living. And in the memoir, the author describes how, in a capitalist society, only the privileged few will be able to have that level of security - and she is among them. I appreciated this open admission of how much luck was involved in her ability to keep her current life secure, because it would have been so terribly easy to turn this entire narrative into a “pull yourself up by the bootstraps” story, and that would have rung horrifically false.
But for all that there’s plenty that’s sad and heart-breaking in this memoir, there’s plenty of bright spots too - and it’s not just the cats. Oftentimes, it’s those moments when the author finds a sense of community with other people that shine the brightest: whether it’s with her fellow cat rescuers, or faceless strangers on the internet, or even a random man in a gold Mustang who throws hotdogs onto a property to feed the cats he left behind. This could so easily have been about just the cats, but I like how the author brings in the people around her into the story too, and shows how important they are.
Overall, this was a very touching read, one that doesn’t stint in showing the darker side of cat rescue, people, and society as a whole, along with the lighter side. It doesn’t try to be inspirational, but instead tries to show how community (of both cats and people) have changed the author’s life for the better - and, maybe, they can do the same for the reader, as well.
Originally posted at kamreadsandrecs.tumblr.com.
Oh but this got me in some VERY soft places, it really did. I don’t know what I was expecting, but getting teary-eyed once every chapter was certainly NOT it. (This is a compliment, btw.)
I found it interesting how the author anchored aspects of her life story to some of the notable cats she rescued and cared for after she and her partner moved into their house in Poets Square. There are many themes discussed in this memoir - feminism in the context of animal welfare; the economic pressures of having to survive in the United States; the knock-on effects of mental illness on one’s life - but the way they’re framed, grounded in the story of a cat that the author has cared for, brings a kind of immediacy to the storytelling that can definitely bring on the waterworks for some readers (as it certainly did for me).
While the cats certainly are important to the stories told in this memoir, the people are just as important. My personal favorite story - and one of the ones that I think deserves the most attention - was the story of the Desert Palms cat colony. The cats might have been the reason that brought the author to that place, but I like how she focused more on the poverty-stricken, homeless individuals who lived in the area. Like the cats, they, too, were suffering - but unlike the cats, people were always so willing to offer them the empathy and help they so desperately needed. The author was right to point out that wherever cats suffer, there are people suffering too: she makes this clear by pointing out that there are no feral cats in upper class neighborhoods, while there are great numbers of them in lower class neighborhoods. Both cats and people suffer under systemic oppression and injustice, but only cats are deemed worthy of unquestioning compassion. It all boils down to the puritanical view of suffering as divine punishment that feels so damn AMERICAN at times: cats don’t “deserve” to suffer, because they are animals and therefore innocent. People, on the other hand, are sinful creatures, and so therefore if a person suffers, they must have done something to “deserve” it.
This leads me to another point about this memoir: it does not attempt to sugarcoat how hard working in animal welfare in general and cat rescue in particular can be. The author does not stint in describing how she manages her grief; how she has to confront situations where she will find dead kittens, dead cats; and how, so often, cats will inevitably just die in the vet clinic or even before she can even get to their location to rescue them. She says she knows all the ways a cat can suffer, all the ways an animal can suffer - but crucially, she does not claim it makes her a better person. Suffering is not something that will make one stronger; it just compounds and compounds until one does not want to face the world again. But inevitably, she says, one must do so, because that’s how life works. One must keep going - for the cats, certainly, but for the people around oneself, too.
Of course, being able to keep going with life would be much easier if one had the ability to mitigate the rest of life’s difficulties, which means: money. Not necessarily billionaire levels of it, but enough to support the exigencies and contingencies of living. And in the memoir, the author describes how, in a capitalist society, only the privileged few will be able to have that level of security - and she is among them. I appreciated this open admission of how much luck was involved in her ability to keep her current life secure, because it would have been so terribly easy to turn this entire narrative into a “pull yourself up by the bootstraps” story, and that would have rung horrifically false.
But for all that there’s plenty that’s sad and heart-breaking in this memoir, there’s plenty of bright spots too - and it’s not just the cats. Oftentimes, it’s those moments when the author finds a sense of community with other people that shine the brightest: whether it’s with her fellow cat rescuers, or faceless strangers on the internet, or even a random man in a gold Mustang who throws hotdogs onto a property to feed the cats he left behind. This could so easily have been about just the cats, but I like how the author brings in the people around her into the story too, and shows how important they are.
Overall, this was a very touching read, one that doesn’t stint in showing the darker side of cat rescue, people, and society as a whole, along with the lighter side. It doesn’t try to be inspirational, but instead tries to show how community (of both cats and people) have changed the author’s life for the better - and, maybe, they can do the same for the reader, as well.
Originally posted at kamreadsandrecs.tumblr.com.