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25 of 25 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A refreshing change from many autobiographies., March 26, 2002
Ms. Piercy shares with us her life - unsanitized, unpasteurized, in all its naked glory. She does not attempt to present herself as Saint Marge, but unapologetically offers her humanity. From her childhood in Detroit, through stints in Boston and California, then finally back to lovely Wellfleet, we see a brave, intelligent, strong woman struggling to live her life to the best of her ability. This book is an inspiration - I recommend it heartily to all women seeking to engage fully with life. Ms. Piercy addresses the cats who have populated her life as completely as she does any of the humans. Animal lovers will understand and appreciate the love she exudes in print for her four-legged family members. On the negative side, she sometimes jumps around from topic to topic, a bit disjointedly...but I pretended I was having a conversation over coffee with her, and the writing style fell into place.
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17 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Sleeping with Cats and other choices, February 23, 2002
My girlfriend loaned me this book. I read it for a few hours one evening, and nearly finished it the next. I worked in the NYC movement that Ms Piercy describes and knew people she mentions. This is a memoir that I could call my own; it describes her, my, and our generation's journey from our working class backgrounds to our own knowledge-worker class, who put aside the acquisition of monetary success in favor of having a life in a small town, and sleeping with cats. I'm a cat person, tho currently without one, and thoroughly enjoyed her cat stories. My story with my aging parents is similar to hers. There is much laughter, here, in watching cats. There are tears to be shed, too, watching cats, friends, lovers, parents, come into our lives and make their exits. I'll buy my own copy, to read again and write down her quotes:
"Freedom is choice." I'll buy this book for each of my children; it describes well the journey of me and many of my 60s friends.
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27 of 32 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Painful truthfulness, October 14, 2002
Marge Piercy is well-known for her poetry and for her semi-science fiction novel "Woman on the Edge of Time." She has won literary awards and is certainly an American woman writer of great note. Her honesty and brutal clarity in rendering her memoirs is that more startling, as much of it is unpleasant and she hardly spares herself. Piercy grew up in a lower class Detroit neighborhood, and was brutally beaten by her father while her needs as an adolescent girl were pretty much ignored by her mother. She found love in girl gangs, had illicit sex with both girls and boys, and yet was accepted to University of Michigan, the best public university in the state. Her career there was as an outsider--she was not the typical well-off, middle class sorority or dorm co-ed with cashmere sweaters and pearls. Instead, Piercy started the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and wrote, winning the prestigious Hopwood writing award at U of M. Her writing career spanned the times she belonged to communes, then became disenchanted with the increasingly dogmatic Marxist left movement in the 60's. She bounced from Europe to New York to Boston, to Cape Cod, now her home. In all her writing, Piercy has an uncanny ability to describe her minute observations of place and feeling, a gift attributes to her emotional mother. She expresses the anger at her distant and brutal father, whom she obliquely blames for her mother's death (she had a stroke and he did not call the ambulance service until he had meticulously picked up every fragment of a fluorescent bulb she had broken during her fall.) Her "open marriage" is described with all the ambiguity of such a relationship. No one writes more grittily, more deeply observant than Piercy--the parts of "Woman on the Edge of Time" where the main character is struggling to leave an insane asylum, are so realistic and troubling, it helps to know Piercy from her memoirs to better understand her craft. If you like Piercy's writing, this memoir is a fine way to get to know her and to gain a better understanding of how she creates her fiction and poetry.
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