Sleeping with cats: A memoir

Sleeping with Cats: a memoir

by Marge Piercy, published by William Morrow, 2002, hardcover

Some writers' memoirs make you so fond of them that you wish you knew them personally. Marge Piercy's new memoir is one of those. The novelist, poet, and long-time feminist is down-to-earth in this book.

The book is well-titled. Piercy loves cats, and she tells the story of her feline relationships just as fully and sometimes more affectionately than the story of her human relationships. (Some of the cats are nicer than some of the men.) I have often wondered whether it was appropriate to write about my cats in off our backs and have always concluded that it wasn't political enough, that I would sound soppy. But companion animals are an important part of many women's lives, and, as Piercy relates, sometimes provide our most stable domestic relationships. And isn't that political, to be able to love creatures who don't have power over us? (Most readers with animals are probably thinking, "the hell they don't.") Piercy tells of the joys and sorrows of living with cats. She is so attuned to cats that once when she had brought home a frightened kitten she licked it all over like a mother cat, bonding with it. I found this wonderful. I was delighted with the tales of her cats' quirks and saddened by the tales of their deaths. Losing a sweet cat is a terrible loss, but Piercy always finds more cats to love. Caring for new cats is the best way of honoring the one you have lost, she feels. I agree. I couldn't live without a cat.

Piercy grew up in Detroit at a time when there were restricted covenants against Jews, such as her family, in many neighborhoods. Her family was working class and her father, unable to have power at work, lorded it over his household. He always had a car (a new one every two years) although the family sometimes had only oatmeal to eat and Piercy never had anything new.

Piercy determined early that she would go to college and become a writer, choices her parents never understood, indeed actively opposed. She managed.

Fortunately, she always believed in and insisted on the importance of her writing, even through a first marriage to a man who cared nothing about it.

The movement-at first the antiwar movement, as she was an early opponent of the war in Vietnaminstilled in her the belief that she had to do everything, be in every demonstration, take care of everyone else in the movement, write for the movement-but it also provided the material for her early fiction. Torn by many demands-she and her second husband at this time always had many people living with them or crashing, and Piercy felt she had to cook for all of them and even meet their emotional needs-she nevertheless managed to write, even if it meant getting only a few hours of sleep.

At a party, she found her second husband, Robert, pawing another woman. She was devastated, but when he said he wanted an open relationship, she eventually went along, like so many woman of the era. She also had relationships, and eventually found her third husband, Ira Woods, who proved to be much more empathetic than her previous husbands and lovers. ,

Piercy is very honest about her love for sex. She did try involvements with women at a time when many women in the movement were exploring, but she found that she was too used to men to change. She found that sex with women was too prolonged compared with what she was used to.

She tells only a little about the women's movement. I could have wished for more, but I enjoyed the book so much that I can't quibble. It was interesting, and sad, to hear that Cape Cod Women's Liberation was destroyed by beer. The group held a fund-raising party and bought way too much beer for it. They couldn't sell it back for what they paid for it, and they had to close their women's center. Of course then everyone blamed everyone else. How sad that our institutions have been so fragile.

Sadly, in recent years Piercy has had terrible problems with glaucoma. For a time, she was so unable to see that she had to recite her poetry at readings and could not read from her novels because she had memorized the poetry but could not see to read. After operations, her vision is better, but she still fears that it will go. She appreciates seeing the world even more than she did before. Let's hope she keeps her vision. When she was more disabled, she lost friends. How awful.

Piercy loves nature-she wants to know every bird and every seashell she sees-her home in Cape Cod, anc her garden. She must be delightful to know.

But I can't write about this book without talking about Piercy's novels I have been wanting to write an appreciation of them, and this reviev provides an opportunity.

Do read He, She, and It, a science fiction story about a Jewish woman in a near-future corporate society whose grandmother creates an artificial man who is nicer than the biological men she knows. Interspersed is the story of a golem (also a human-created being) in an East European ghetto.