Sleeping with Cats

by Marge Piercy

Marge Piercy, a writer who is highly praised as both a poet and a novelist, turns her gaze inward as she shares her thoughts on life and explores her development as a woman and writer. She pays tribute to the one loving constant that has offered her comfort and meaning even as the faces and events in her life have changed -- her beloved cats. With searing honesty, Piercy tells of her strained childhood growing up in a religiously split, working-class family in Detroit. She examines her myriad friendships and relationships, including two painful early marriages, and reveals their effects on her creativity and career. More than a reminiscence of things past, however, Sleeping With Cats is also a celebration of the present and the future, as Piercy shares her views on aging, creativity, and finding a lasting and improbable love with a man fourteen years younger than herself. A chronicle of the turbulent and exciting journey of one artist's life, Sleeping With Cats is a deeply intimate, unforgettable story.

Genres: Memoir, Nonfiction, Biography, Cats, Poetry, Feminism, Animals

368 pages, Paperback

First published December 24, 2001

About the author

Marge Piercy is an American poet, novelist, and social activist. She is the author of the New York Times bestseller Gone to Soldiers, a sweeping historical novel set during World War II.

Piercy was born in Detroit, Michigan, to a family deeply affected by the Great Depression. She was the first in her family to attend college, studying at the University of Michigan. Winning a Hopwood Award for Poetry and Fiction (1957) enabled her to finish college and spend some time in France, and her formal schooling ended with an M.A. from Northwestern University. Her first book of poems, Breaking Camp, was published in 1968.

An indifferent student in her early years, Piercy developed a love of books when she came down with rheumatic fever in her mid-childhood and could do little but read. "It taught me that there's a different world there, that there were all these horizons that were quite different from what I could see," she said in a 1984 interview.

As of 2013, she is author of seventeen volumes of poems, among them The Moon is Always Female (1980, considered a feminist classic) and The Art of Blessing the Day (1999), as well as fifteen novels, one play (The Last White Class, co-authored with her third and current husband Ira Wood), one collection of essays (Parti-colored Blocks for a Quilt), one non-fiction book, and one memoir.

Her novels and poetry often focus on feminist or social concerns, although her settings vary. While Body of Glass (published in the US as He, She and It) is a science fiction novel that won the Arthur C. Clarke Award, City of Darkness, City of Light is set during the French Revolution. Other of her novels, such as Summer People and The Longings of Women are set during the modern day. All of her books share a focus on women's lives.

Woman on the Edge of Time (1976) mixes a time travel story with issues of social justice, feminism, and the treatment of the mentally ill. This novel is considered a classic of utopian "speculative" science fiction as well as a feminist classic. William Gibson has credited Woman on the Edge of Time as the birthplace of Cyberpunk. Piercy tells this in an introduction to Body of Glass. Body of Glass (He, She and It) (1991) postulates an environmentally ruined world dominated by sprawling mega-cities and a futuristic version of the Internet, through which Piercy weaves elements of Jewish mysticism and the legend of the Golem, although a key story element is the main character's attempts to regain custody of her young son.

Many of Piercy's novels tell their stories from the viewpoints of multiple characters, often including a first-person voice among numerous third-person narratives. Her World War II historical novel, Gone To Soldiers (1987) follows the lives of nine major characters in the United States, Europe and Asia. The first-person account in Gone To Soldiers is the diary of French teenager Jacqueline Levy-Monot, who is also followed in a third-person account after her capture by the Nazis.

Piercy's poetry tends to be highly personal free verse and often addresses the same concern with feminist and social issues. Her work shows commitment to the dream of social change (what she might call, in Judaic terms, tikkun olam, or the repair of the world), rooted in story, the wheel of the Jewish year, and a range of landscapes and settings.

She lives in Wellfleet on Cape Cod, Massachusetts with her husband, Ira Wood.

(from Wikipedia)

Reviews

[Debbie Zapata · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book about Marge Piercy's life and the cats who have shared it with her. I have read Piercy's work since the late 80's when I found Gone to Soldiers; and I collected titles over the years from the used book sales I prowled. Last year when I treated myself to quite a few splurges at my favorite online used bookseller, I ordered as many Piercy books as I could get, and this was one of them.

I liked her honesty in the first chapter. We all remember events in our lives a bit differently than other people who lived through them with us. I see that a lot with my husband, who will tell stories about this or that in such a way that I wonder who he was with at the time, even though I know it was me. Piercy reminds us that this book is her perspective on her life, not anyone else's, which is of course what a reader expects from a memoir.

This sentence, also from the first chapter, touched me deeply. "It is primarily about me, but my life has a spine of cats, and it is also about them." I completely understand what she means by that phrase: I feel the same way about horses, and the fact that I am apart from them these days often makes me feel I am missing something crucial to my life.

The lives of her cats are woven into Piercy's own story. From Buttons to Arofa, from Brutus to Cho-Cho, they share the ups and downs of Piercy's world. She has had Burmese, Siamese, Korat cats, and plain old cat cats. Every one was special to her, every one was a unique personality and greatly treasured.

Piercy had a rough childhood. She had to learn to cope with the emotional and physical traumas she went through each day. She was Jewish and was beaten for that. She was poor and was taunted for that. She was not a boy so her father practically ignored her. She joined gangs; she carried a knife to protect herself if she could not run fast enough to escape trouble. And through it all she had a fiercely burning desire to BE, to get away, to live her life on her own terms. I have even more admiration for her after reading this book than when I knew her only through her fiction. She may not have lived a 'normal' life (whatever that may be), but she has certainly lived, and has proven herself to be a survivor.

Thank you, Ms. Piercy for this book, for all the others I have enjoyed and for those still waiting. But most of all, thank you for being the inspiration you are to me and to all women who choose not to have 'normal' lives.

[Rebecca · Rating 4 out of 5]

I discovered Piercy through her poetry, then read Woman on the Edge of Time, a feminist classic that contrasts utopian and dystopian views of the future. Like May Sarton (whom Piercy knew), she devotes equal energy to both fiction and poetry and is an inveterate cat lady. Piercy is still publishing and blogging at 88; I have much to catch up on from her back catalogue. A précis of her life is almost stranger than fiction: she grew up in poverty in Detroit, joining a teen gang and discovering her sexuality first with other girls (“The first time I had an orgasm—I was eleven—I was astonished and also I had a feeling of recognition. Of course, that’s it. As if that was what I had been expecting or looking for”) then with men; had a couple abortions, including one self-administered, then got sterilized; honed her writing craft at college; married three times – briefly to a Frenchman, an unhappy open arrangement, and now for 40+ years to fellow writer Ira Wood; and wrote like a dervish yet has remained on the periphery of the literary establishment and thus struggled financially.

Political activism has been a constant for Piercy, whether protesting the Vietnam War or supporting women’s reproductive rights. She and Wood also nurtured a progressive Jewish community around their Cape Cod home. Again like Sarton, she has always embraced the term feminist but been more resistant to queerness. A generational thing, perhaps; nowadays we would surely call Piercy bisexual or at least sexually fluid, but she’s more apt to dismiss her teen girlfriends and her later affairs with women as a phase. The personal life and career mesh here, though there is more of a focus on the former, such that I haven’t really gotten a clear idea of which of her novels I might want to try. Each chapter ends with one of her poems (wordy, autobiographical free verse), giving a flavour of her work in other genres. She portrays herself as a nomad who wandered various cities before settling into an unexpectedly homely and seasonal existence: “I am a stray cat who has finally found a good home.”

I admired Piercy’s self-knowledge here: her determination to write (including to keep her late mother alive in her) and to preserve the solitude necessary to her work –

I know I am an intense, rather angular passionate woman, not easy to like, not easy to live with, even for myself. Convictions, causes jostle in me. My appetites are large. I have learned to protect my work time and my privacy fiercely. I have been a better writer than a person, and again and again I made that choice. Writing is my core. I do not regret the security I have sacrificed to serve it.

and her conviction that motherhood was not for her –

I did not want children. I never felt I would be less of a woman, but I feared I would be less of a writer if I reproduced. I didn’t feel anything special about my genetic composition warranted replicating it. … I liked many of my friends’ children as they grew older: I was a good aunt. But I never desired to possess them or have one of my own. … I have never regretted staying childless. My privacy, my time for work … are precious. I feel my life is full enough.

“There were no role models for a woman like me,” she felt at the end of college, but she can in her turn be a role model of the female artist’s life, socially engaged and willing to take risks.

As to the title: There is, of course, special delight here for cat lovers. Piercy has had cats since she was a child, and in the Cape Cod era has usually kept a band of five or so. In the interludes we meet some true characters: Arofa the Siamese, Cho-Cho who lived to 21, mother and son Dinah and Oboe, alpha male Jim Beam, and many more. Of course, they age and fall ill and there are some goodbye scenes. She mostly describes these unsentimentally – if you’ve read Doris Lessing on cats, I’d say the attitude is similar. There are extremes of both love and despair: she licks a kitten to bond with her; she euthanizes one beloved cat herself. She wrote this memoir at 65 and felt that her cats were teaching her how to age.

There is a sadness to living with old cats; also a comfort and pleasure, for you know each other thoroughly and the trust is almost absolute. … The knowledge of how much I will miss them is always with me, but so is the sense of my own time flowing out, my life passing and the necessity to value it as I value them. Old cats are precious.

Even those unfamiliar with Piercy’s work might enjoy reading a perspective on the radical movements of the 1960s and 70s. This was right up my street because of her love of cats, her defence of the childfree life, and her interest in identity and memory. Because she doesn’t talk in depth about her oeuvre, you needn’t have read anything else of hers to appreciate reading this. I hope you have a cat who will nap on your lap as you do so.

Originally published on my blog, Bookish Beck.

[Zinta · Rating 4 out of 5]

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

[Susan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting memoir by a writer I have followed through the years. I enjoyed all her novels from her early years on. (She sure had a lot of sex! With many partners!) Guess she is old now. (like me!) :) I loved hearing about all of her beloved cats. We are both cat ladies.

[Ruth · Rating 4 out of 5]

Marge Piercy is a fascinating person. We are almost the same age, and in many ways our experiences overlap. We lived in San Francisco at the same time. Back in the 60s she led the life I then wanted to lead. I'm sort of glad it didn't happen, given the complications of Piercy's life. More fun to read about it. Interesting how she weaves the stories of her cats through the stories of her life.

[Peter Tillman · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5 stars, excellent. Of course, it's the cats I remember....

[Andrea · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely adored this memoir. I was crying at the end because, among other things, Piercy herself acknowledged that she's not as famous as other writers and therefore has to keep publishing, doing readings, etc., to make a living. I wish she were as beloved as JK Rowling because she's certainly more prolific and diverse in her genre span and feminism. But, as she noted, academics (like I once was when I wrote my thesis on her poetry) don't dictate what sells.

But hey, if this review and the updates leading to it get you curious about Piercy, by all means go seek out this book and her others. She has something for pretty much everyone. I even got my mom to read one of her novels, and she's fairly sequestered from literary fiction.

So much love for Marge Piercy! I'm glad I read this and got to know her more.

[CatReader · Rating 3 out of 5]

In her 2001 memoir Sleeping with Cats, American novelist and poet Marge Piercy (b. 1936) looks back at her life from the vantage point of her mid-60s. I picked up this book never having heard of Marge Piercy, but being attracted to the title as a fellow cat aficionado. While cats do feature prominently in this book (more on that later), for much of Piercy's early and midlife they're more of a background presence as Piercy recounts various minutiae of her life, from her Jewish childhood in Detroit, her college days at the University of Michigan, her three marriages, her writing career, her political activism in the 60s, and the general sense of a full life well-lived. That being said, I feel like a good chunk of these details (like every health ailment Piercy ever had) could likely have been trimmed out or down from the ~350 page final product, as I found myself skimming these parts in disinterest. There are many parallels between Piercy's life and her contemporary Gail Sheehy's (1936-2020), as I was frequently reminded of Sheehy's fascinating memoir Daring: My Passages) while reading this book.

Piercy's cats were the highlight of this memoir for me. Like me, Piercy never wanted human children of her own, and her life has been enriched with many cats, some temporary visitors, and others decade-long companions. The beginning of the book was really hard for me to get through as Piercy recalls a long series of childhood cats who had short lives and brutal ends, likely reflecting attitudes and lack of veterinary resources available at that time. Piercy continued to have intermittent relationships with cats until her late 20s/early 30s, when she first had the stability in her life to maintain a cat long-term, a Siamese female named Arofa. I loved reading her tributes to each of her cats, and though she doesn't offer this reflection herself, it seems like her cats taught her many life lessons and were among the most meaningful, reciprocal and enduring relationships in her life.

My statistics:
Book 28 for 2025
Book 1954 cumulatively

[Nikki · Rating 5 out of 5]

Cats. Poetry. Politics. Sex. Sexual Politics. Feminism. Activism. Tough women.

Would that I had read this book when I was 17. I could have used it. Marge Piercy is amazing.

[Leila · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'd never read a Piercy book before Sleeping With Cats. I chose it randomly because my library offered it as a digital Kindle rental, and I grew up with many cats, so the familiarity appealed to me. Anyone who values cats that much must be someone I understand, right?

This book was wonderful, and one of the most well-written and sophisticated memoirs I've read. Rather than writing a book with the sole purpose of glorifying herself (as too many writers do), or writing a book that's main appeal is shock value, or to explain her side of a controversial event, she writes something more complex (although it doesn't abstain from these things either). Piercy wrote a strong narrative with thoughtful commentary, political and historical relevance, intimate and sometimes scandalous details, and a beautiful, weaving story. Even though I never knew about Piercy beforehand, after reading the book I was fully absorbed in her marriages and love problems, her cats, her feminism, and her rags-to-riches writer success story.

Piercy wrote about herself in a way that was warm and personable. She didn't fluff herself up too much or degrade herself too much. She seemed proud of herself and her accomplishments despite her weaknesses. She seemed familiar. She reminded me of different relatives of mine who are her age (the fact that she is Jewish, a women's right advocate, a writer, a cat collector, or married three times, are all things that describe one or the other of my grandmas). At points she reminded me of myself, as any great memoir writer should. So maybe I had a certain bias towards her because of this familiarity - and if so, you should consider that when reading my review.

Although I am still not sure whether I will pick up any of her other writings (poetry was never really my thing), I can say that Marge Piercy wrote a memoir worth respect.

[Karen-Leigh · Rating 4 out of 5]

I copied out chunks of this book as much resonated with my own life. Her relationship with her mother, what she found upon her mother's death. The deaths of her cats. The rest that I had nothing in common with was well described and interesting and though there were bits that were hard to read (mainly the realization that all that energy and time spent by so many passionate, involved women has gone for naught as the political climate has changed again and women are being regressed to chattel). I wondered as I finished the book what the writer thought of the present day at age 85.

[Sarah · Rating 5 out of 5]

I took a bit to get into this at the beginning, mostly because I wasn't feeling up to reading memoir type stuff, but Piercy hooked me anyway, and then I tore through this. Fantastic writing. Weaves her very personal experiences with her poetry, discusses her lifelong relationships with various cats as well as people. She brings you from 1940s Detroit through the turbulent and expansive 1960s to present day. I had never read her books before this, and definitely plan to now.

[Rebecca Huston · Rating 4 out of 5]

A delightful book on the relationship that the author had with cats. It's a good book to read, but also be aware that there are some painful parts to read. Still I do recommend this one, and rate it at four stars.

For the longer review, please go here:
http://www.mylot.com/response/2898343...

[Will · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really enjoyed this as a social history of the 21st century through Piercy's life; lots of good stuff about abortion rights, Vietnam, lefty activism, publishing, politics refracted through the personal, etc. Every chapter ends with a poem about the chapter’s themes, which felt very intimate.

I must say I would've liked more cat content.

[Chel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Marge Piercy's voice has been present in my life since the early 1970s -- I have not read everything she has written, but what I have read has been important to me. This book spoke to me on three levels--her experience as an activist (she is enough older than I to have offered a guiding perspective about what preceded the times I lived through, the insights of an older sister, while still seeming familiar), her life as a writer, which is much referred to but not really explored, and her own evolution as a person in relationship to others. The book is what I consider a real memoir--her memories, experiences, reflections are presented without an effort to frame them into an arc of suspense and resolution like a novel. (Actually, you could argue that this is what happens in her primary relationships with men, but it feels real, not contrived.)

The title suggests the perspective: it is based at home, the various homes she has lived in through her life (home is where you sleep, home is where your cats are). Even when she writes about travel and political action, she writes about them from the perspective of how they have an impact on her life at home. You rarely go with her on her trips, and hardly ever into the streets or into the collaborative work of movement groups, or into the process of creating a poem. That is OK--you can only write so much, and this book makes the parts she does describe come to life. I wonder why she wrote it. I had a vague sense that she wanted to set down her perspective and justify her choices to all the critics. At any rate, even though I wanted to know so much more, it was delicious.

[Carolyn · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have loved Marge Piercy's poetry and only three of her novels, but only because I still have to buy or borrow the rest. This particular biography made me fall even more in love with her work and the author. I took writing advise from this bio and I might use it in future. While I am more of a dog person than a cat person, I could still relate the mystery and magic of kinship between two separate species. I greatly enjoyed this book.

[Jenniffer · Rating 4 out of 5]

A wonderful memoir. Another author that I now understand more clearly my connection. As with Dorothy Allison, she has a working class background and a strong feminist sense and history. The framing of the book with her relationship with the cats in her life spoke to me as well. It has made me think about the relationships I have had with animals in my life (dogs have played a role in my life as well.) It has given me another leaping off place for stories.

[Barbara · Rating 4 out of 5]

Intelligent and unsentimental

Sometimes rambling, often brilliantly evocative, Sleeping With Cats, pleased me most when Piercy spoke of her cats. I felt her connection to them was profoundly moving. I even shed some tears when she described Oboe's death. Thank you for a book that explores our relationship to these sensitive and intelligent beings.

[Mary · Rating 4 out of 5]

I didn’t know of Marge Piercy before I got this book. Now I intend to read more of her, fiction and poetry alike. There is a poem at the end of each chapter. I really liked The Weight and Dignity but Putting The Good Things Away undid me. It’s about going through her mother’s house and discovering that she had never used the good gifts she’d been given by her daughter. Oh My.

[Dottie · Rating 4 out of 5]

An amazing life which gave us an amazing writer. Fascinating and very detailed and personal memoir. Poems ending each chapter relative to the event addressed.

[Kayla · Rating 4 out of 5]

I honestly want to read this again. How I love a poet as similar to me, especially one who loves cats haha

[Diane Wilkes · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've read most of Piercy's fiction and am a big fan (Braided Lives and Vida are the books I'd recommend highest, unless you're a saga or WWII fan, in which case, Born to Soldiers might be more your bag). For some reason, I never realized she wrote a memoir, so I dipped into Sleeping with Cats and the dip ended up necessitating a full swim. Because I love her writing THAT much.

I should write more but my hand/tendons are hurting. More later. Highly recommended.

Update: Marge Piercy is about 20 years older than I am, so while I am a child of the 60's, she was an adult during that period, and embraced a sixties lifestyle (Feminism! Open Marriage! SDS and abortion activist!). I knew something about that from her books Vida and Braided Lives, which I adored, but I didn't realize when I read them what a jump it was from being brought up in the staid 40's. (Piercy attended college in the fifties.)

The young Marge was devoted to her mother, who was a thrice married Jewish immigrant who encouraged her daughter's reading, but not her being a free spirit. Before they moved from a more poor/working class neighborhood, young teen Marge's bff was a junkie prostitute and she had a gang (not a drug gang, and one that eschewed guns for knives and other more basic weaponry--this was the 40's!). Yet Marge was also a great student who saw her way out of the cookie cutter life of being a woman in poverty as only possible through college. She got a free ride to U of M, and quickly got recognition for her poetry and skill with English.

Naturally, she became a passionate writer at a time when women writers were not taught or respected much in academia--and was therefore not immediately given the kind of attention and upward career thrusts her male peers received. Reading how she became the prolific, successful author and activist she did is told through her life with various men, women, and cats.

Her keen observational skills of human nature, feline nature, and nature nature (she is also an avid gardener) make this book such a warm, rich read. She often mentions her not being an easy person to like, but I find her purely delightful. I would love to exchange tarot readings with her sometime (yes, she studied and gave tarot readings, too!!! Her Mom had been a predictive palm reader, but Marge was more drawn to the symbolic richness of tarot and more philosophical, self-actualizing readings. My kinda gal.)

[Micebyliz]

I absorbed this book. I just loved it. I know it's a memoir but i felt like it spoke to me somehow.
Having had cats in the past i understood how important they are to one's life and how terribly hard it is to lose them.
Her life was so different than mine yet i felt a connection on many levels. I read this almost all in one sitting because it was as if someone was speaking to me and i didn't want to interrupt them.
The courage it must have taken to write this i cannot imagine. I would love to write a memoir but i don't have the talent for one thing, and i am unwilling to open my life up as she did. But i admire and respect someone who can.

[Julie Butcher · Rating 5 out of 5]

“I am still that child. I eavesdrop on the conversations of strangers in restaurants, in airports and supermarkets. I drive my husband crazy with questions sometimes; but I am still a good listener and I still keep secrets.”
― Marge Piercy, Sleeping with Cats

I loved, loved, loved reading this book and I will miss it.

I do love a good memoir, I've recently discovered. But this is more. Marge Piercy! Plus cats.

[Susan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I liked the mixed genres of this book: poetry, stories of causes, relationships, and of course, cats. Portraits of the many cats’ various traits and adventures are the most vivid writing, but Piercy also explores her troubled relationships with each of her parents, as individuals. She has a passionate voice, reflecting on an active life with three husbands, many friends over time and some enemies, and the love of her property and community on Cape Cod.

[Sue Ellen · Rating 1 out of 5]

I didn't finish reading this book, but I am done with it. When I got to the point where she was describing a dog tearing a small kitten apart, I closed it out and removed it from my Kindle. Unfortunately, there is no way to remove that horrible graphic scene from my memory. I'm going to move it to my "Gave-up-on" folder, but I had to leave a warning for others who might think this was going to be a cat friendly book. It is not!

[Shanna · Rating 3 out of 5]

Marge Piercy led an interesting, active, eventful life. Born during the depression, growing up during a world war, coming of age on the cusp of the fight for equality, establishing herself as a writer and social activist. Through it all, she shared her home with numerous cats. Piercy details the events of her life in parallel with the personalities of the cats she had at the time.

[Marybeth · Rating 5 out of 5]

A lovely and unique memoir, which includes one of Piercy’s poems in each chapter, relevant to the content, and in which the details of her life with her cats are some of the most poignant sections of the book.

[Emmi · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very interesting memoir by a writer I love who has led a VERY interesting life.

[Mariah Goode · Rating 3 out of 5]

I've loved many of her novels, and it was interesting to learn more about her life, but parts of this memoir are repetitive and not well edited and just plain too long.