Customer Reviews

Sleeping with Cats: A Memoir

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

I have been a Marge Piercy fan for years, more of her novels than her poems. I eagerly snatched up this book and read it in one day. In some ways it reminds me of May Sarton's autobigoraphy though the two are quite different; Piercy writes from a less erudite, less upper-class, more working-class perspective.

Piercy writes honestly and openly about her life, loves, and trials and tribulations as a writer. It was especially interesting to read about how she still sees herself as struggling and working hard to make ends meet because she has not achieved the commercial success to make her rich. The strongest parts of the book for me were those about her relationships with men, particularly her three husbands. She does not hold back in detailing her hopes, denials of reality, and what she calls her "selfishness" in terms of making writing a priority. As she herself suggests she is not always the most "likable" person but she is honest, direct, and really makes you think. You really get to see how she evolves as a person, how she comes to stand up for what she really wants, not what society tells her she should do, e.g. stay in a marriage and "make it work." I cheered for her when she finally finds her "soulmate", or at least a partner that seems to understand her and make her happy.

The parts about the cats I could have done without, not being a cat person. I also wish there had been more about her political involvement; the emphasis of the book on her personal relationships with family, lovers and friends suggests that the "personal" has been more central to her life than the political. Though she does mention her involvement with pro-choice politics, her political activities are quite peripheral to the book.

Another thing I enjoyed is that you get to see how the characters of her novels come out of her life experiences. Piercy does not hesitate to let the reader know her for better or for worse, her fears, her pettiness, her victories, her commitments and her tenacity. A worthwhile read!

Lyrically written, Marge Piercy dances us through her childhood, coming of age, and adulthood. A portrait of the blooming of the new left in the sixties; open marriage, the flaws, fallacies, and avenues of personal growth; and cats, little cats and the specialness of old cats. I loved this book. I read it on my long commute home, and now that I have finished it, I feel like I am missing a friend. When I can think about it without crying, I will write a letter to Marge Piercy and tell her how much I loved this book.

An update: I did write to Ms Piercy, and much to my surprise, she wrote me back! I was pleased to learn she has added an Abyssinian cat to her current menagerie, a breed that have been my constanct companions since college.

I am a cataloging librarian and was working on Marge's latest novel when I decided to read up on her other books. As a new cat owner and a passionate woman I was attracted to this autobiography. Rarely do we ever see a memoir of a famous author's pets! I have to honestly say this is the best autobiography I have read in years. Yes, the language isn't perfect, just like the author, but it is a beautiful tale. I couldn't be more oppisite, not to mention from a totally different generation, then Ms. Piercy but I could still heartfully relate to her emotions. Her poems are treats and magically written. Yes, she does jump around and mentions things several times at different parts of the book but isn't that the way we speak of a memory? She is honest and wants you to become her companion, not a distance audience. If you have a pet you will relate to her heartfelt goodbyes to her beloved children. She keeps mentioning how she does not regret never having children, however this whole piece is her relationships with her 4 legged kids!:) What a beautiful, sincere and talented woman she is - I hope to one day meet her (update: I did! And brought this book. She told me that rarely do people bring this one when they meet her, she thought it was magical). I highly recommend this book to anyone who has an open soul.

Like most autobiographies of famous folks this book is best in the part before she become Marge Piercy, famous feminist author. She gives a straight picture of her life growing up in a working class and lower middle class areas of Detroit in the forties and early 1950s which is my favorite part of the book. There is the toughness and rawness of working class life, the ambiguousness of sexuality, and some of the stark hard knocks realities of the utter cruelty of children, and the far distance parents are.

The second favorite part of the book is her discussion of her hard struggling days attempting to be, refusing to be, being knarled at being a proper young middle class wife in the late 1950s and early 1960s, as well as her fight to become a writer and not a literature academic.

Marge does very well in those areas. Once she gets to around 1966 (where I came into this movie) she just goes too darned fast. Instead of taking time to narrate things, she starts giving her opinions about things. I am familiar with the places and people and things she speaks about in New York in the late 1960s, but I wonder if someone one who wasn't there would be able to follow what she talks about.

This book says almost nothing about Piercy as a writer except how she fought to write in her life in college, how writing saved her and gave her back her world in her hard days after her first marriage ended, and the general fight to have time to write and not have to do other stuff to earn a living after she became "established."

Yet, she never talks about different writers who inspired her, how she actually works, how she stands on disputes over techniques, how she sees her poetry and her fiction, or how she answers the questions that many of us have about the two Marges, the ham fisted strong willed plot boiling fiction writer who does the job and goes on without much verbal flare or subltety and the delicate, sensitive, lyrical poet she has always been, although even in the poem's The Marge's mastery of plain talk from the heart runs through.

I haven't said anything about cats. The cats in this book are not a gimmick. If you read the book--I won't spoil it--you will understand that from childhood, cats have been a special part of her life and identity. It is really necessary to know her for her to explain the relationships she has had with each of the cats that has inhabited her life. Just as necessary as for her to explain each of her parents and her husbands.

I confess to be an unbiased fan of Marge Piercy as both a writer and a person whom I admire. For me, this book gives more sense to different autobiographical threads in her work and clarifies confusions I had about her age (I thought she was about 10 years younger than she is from the times I have seen her, from all the good things I know she has done for people I know, always behind the scenes never trying to get the credit she is due).

Yet, I am not sure how interesting this would be for someone who is not a Piercy fan.

I would recommend that the reader who likes the pre-success part of Marge's story read her two more autobiographical novels Braided Lives and Small Changes. These were among her first books and seem to be neglected these days. There is a lot of meaning in both of those books. In fact, I used to read Braided Lives annually, or when I was in a tight fix personally--stolen cars, lost girl friends, fear of losing my job.

This book was NOT what I expected. If you're wanting a book about CATS and ONLY cats, this is NOT the book for you...but if you're like me and fell inlove with the title and love cats, and are willing to give this book a chance--you WON'T REGRET IT.

It is a GREAT book, all about the life of the author and growing up Jewish and everything else that comes with being a little girl who does love cats...but can't seem to hang on to them...thanks to dear ole dad.

I hated to see it end.

An honest writer will admit that everything that he or she writes, down to a grocery list, is in some form autobiography, revealing the author's sense of life, core values, interests. The art of literary expression, like any art, is a self-portrait, and the higher the level of quality, the truer we have been to ourselves. When a book reads flat or false, suspect a lie.

When Marge Piercy writes--and she writes like nobody's business, having to date published 17 novels and 17 collections of poetry--she comes to life on the page. Piercy is the perfect illustration of a writer's words shaping the self-portrait, because it makes no difference what genre or style she chooses, she rings true. Poetry or prose, fiction, nonfiction, science fiction, no doubt even that grocery list, show facets of the author. Reading this memoir, Sleeping with Cats, confirms that accuracy, adding layers of understanding to her creative work, for here we see her characters at their birthing place, in the lifelines of Piercy herself.

Piercy was born in the mid 1930s in Detroit, Michigan. Her ethnic background is Jewish and Lithuanian, but it is the former that roots most deeply in her. Her father was a hard-hearted man, an often abusive husband and father, never letting her forget he would have much preferred a son. Their relationship moved between cool and cold, their most successful conversations "about the Tigers and the weather." In his entire lifetime, Piercy's father never read any of his daughter's books.

Her mother was a submissive woman who made a career of repressing dreams while trying, as emotionally battered women do, to please the husband that would not be pleased. Yet she knew her feminine powers and used them like weapons or tools of survival, while they were not enough to save her own dwindling spirit (and perhaps contributed to its brokenness). She seemed to resent the unbreakable spirit in her daughter, who observed as a girl her mother, an incurable flirt, around other men:

"Half the men we dealt with were convinced she was crazy about them, but she mostly felt contempt. They were marks. She had a job to do and she did it. She was obsessed with my father, not with any of these men about whom she had a rich vocabulary of Yiddish insults which she muttered to me after each encounter."

It was a tough childhood of gangs and early sex, with boys as well as other girls, of a pregnancy at age 17 that Piercy had to abort herself, nearly bleeding to death in the process. She never would have children, never wanted them. She learned about life through the hardest knocks, losing a young girlfriend turned prostitute to a heroin overdose ("I understood why she had let her pimp get her hooked: it numbed her."), and having her fingers broken by her angry father, and always knowing herself different, an outsider--yet somehow never really doubting her own worth. She made being different work for her. These were the makings of a young woman who would become one of America's strongest feminist voices.

Piercy is educated at University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Michigan. She wins scholarships. She earns top grades. She is self-sufficient in all things. Piercy is smart and she knows it, and she uses her mind with equal prowess to using her sexuality, enjoying both, lavishing easily in the pleasures each provide. Swearing to never marry ("Marriage... seemed to me a kind of death for a woman, in which she lost not only her will and her power but even her name. I was determined never to marry..."), she marries early, and marries three times. Piercy makes no saint of herself here, nor does she demonize her husbands or lovers. They come to one another with faults, give love best they know how, leave with a few scars left behind but also gifts and valuable lessons.

Piercy's second marriage is open, like it or not, at her husband's insistence. She comes to accept her husband's affairs, focusing on her own interests and literary pursuits. Eventually, she takes a lover of her own. It is the 60s, a time of hippies and communal living and making love not war, and Piercy embraces this period of exploration. It works for her. Never becoming a mother, she becomes instead something of a communal mother, the woman at the center of the group, cooking and caring and cleaning for all, maintaining a kind of sanity and order to things. There is something about Piercy that is both rule breaker and order maker, the center of the storm and the anchor in chaos. Her husband's affairs work only when the other women show her due respect and, preferably, friendship--often a closer one with Piercy than with her husband, the shared lover.

Writing and cats are the thread that binds a life that moves from Detroit to Chicago to New York to San Francisco to Paris to Cape Cod, with a few detours between. Piercy is determined to succeed at her art, and she maintains a disciplined pace at creating novels and other works even when nothing sells, or when it does and gets no notice. Piercy has a steely will and the persistence to carry it through. Her marriages succeed, it seems, when they give her the solid ground on which to set up her writing desk. Her second husband gives her five years to succeed, and she sets to work with determination. If it takes her longer than that, no matter, she shrugs off rejection and keeps writing.

Piercy meets her third husband while married to her second, and while one relationship unravels, the third takes on strength. Ira Wood is also a writer, and the two in some ways seem very different, including their 14 year difference (he is the younger), but are soul mates in the ways that matter. Of her relationship choices, Piercy writes: "I do not love primarily with my eyes. I have had lovers who were gorgeous and lovers who were plain, who were skinny and neurasthenic, who were bulky and overweight. I have cared far more for how each of them treated me than for my eyes' pleasure." Piercy speaks for most women in this, with women choosing partners who bring substance to a relationship as of primary importance, and she finds this in her third marriage, a partner with whom she can talk and talk and talk endlessly, argue and debate and discuss, and enjoy a companionship rich in all aspects of intimacy.

Memory is faulty and relative, Piercy writes in her memoir, but hers always rings sound with a story that does not show its heroine in always the kindest light. What gives her voice such strength, after all, is that she is honest in her portrayal of self, and so, of all her characters, admitting to faults and mistakes, not shying away from moments of truth. We see the outsider, we see the survivor, we see the woman who will never be ashamed or apologetic of her appetite for life.

At the conclusion of each chapter is one of Piercy's poems, adding another layer of insight to her experience. Many times, these poetic interludes are our chance to look the deepest into Piercy's psyche and heart. And if we ever doubt that this woman of determination and smarts and steely survival skills lacks a more conventional feminine softness, we can be assured it is there. We see it for those allowed into her closest circle--her cats. She loves fully her felines, her heart breaks at their loss, and she nurtures and nourishes and pampers like a true earth mother. Her observations of their personality quirks and antics and changing moods are often the most delightful sections of her writing. She loves and is loved unconditionally by her cats, and as living things do, here is where she comes most alive.

Concluding her memoir, for those who have already read some of Piercy's works, and understanding her background gives a reader much greater understanding of the characters in her many, many books. We see the faces of Piercy, of her husbands and lovers, her parents, her friends, and yes, her cats. They appear in all her books, and so we see, this memoir is only one of her many memoirs, each one a stunningly honest and open look at what makes a woman a woman, how she expresses herself in freedom, how she loves and lets go and lives to love again--her men, her cats, her work, her homes, her world.

~Zinta Aistars for The Smoking Poet, Spring 2010 Issue

I just love Marge Piercy. I have not yet finished this book, but so far it has already won me over as strongly as her poetry collection entitled Colors Passing Through Us, which I also recommend.

She has such an authentic, clear voice. I read one novel of hers, and it was interesting and reasonably thought provoking, but her writing about herself is simply amazing.