Home >  A & E >  Books

'Sleeping With Cats' by Marge Piercy

The long road to self-discovery

Sunday, April 21, 2002

By Betsy Kline, Post-Gazette Staff Writer

	Sleeping With Cats By Marge Piercy Morrow $25.95

Cats continue to teach me a lot of what is important in my life, and also, how short it is, how we need to express our love to those for whom we feel it, daily, nightly, in every way we can.”

It seems a simple lesson, but as writer Marge Piercy makes abundantly clear in her memoir, “Sleeping With Cats,” all self-knowledge exacts a price. And sometimes it comes too late to save those relationships we value most.

Piercy did not blossom overnight into her role as lover, poet, writer, activist and feminist. By her own articulate account, she had to fight for every scrap of personal identity, sometimes discarding temporary personas on the way to discovering who she really was and could be.

Her Detroit childhood was marred by parents who were constantly at war with each other. Their working-class life was sorely tested in bad neighborhoods. Piercy joined a street gang at 12 and soon was sexually active.

Violence -- although not the drug-fueled madness of today, she points out -- was a regular visitor. Age 15 was a turning point: Her best friend died of a heroin overdose, her beloved Jewish grandmother died, and her cat was poisoned by neighbors angry that her family was selling their house to nonwhites.

It was a wake-up call, but still the reality of her home life was stifling. As much as she wanted to, she couldn’t connect with her mother, a proud woman thwarted in her potential by a demanding, mentally cruel husband.

Piercy knew the power of words, and she banked on them to be her ticket out of the loveless ghetto of home. She wrote out of both frustration and hope, even if hers was the only voice that answered her back.

By sheer force of will and nascent talent, she earned a full-tuition scholarship to the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and a chance to reinvent herself.

This memoir derives much of its emotional and intellectual power from the author’s powerful personality. College was truly a coming-out party of sorts, as Piercy left home and immediately began to awaken to the possibilities, like a dry sponge dropped into a glass of water.

She made a disastrous marriage to a French physicist in her early 20s, in which she tried to be the good wifey and gourmet cook. She struggled to the realization that she was the only person who could make her dream of becoming a poet and writer come true. But first she had to exist as a person, not as the servant to another person’s ego. Scratch husband No. 1.

The next marriage gave her the requisite “room of one’s own” to try her hand at writing novels and poetry. She and her computer-techno husband (before computers were the darlings of Wall Street) crisscrossed the country. The ’60s were heady times in San Francisco. Piercy plugged into the local arts scene and started to come into her own as a writer.

The anti-Vietnam War movement energized and politicized her. The women’s liberation groundswell was just beginning. She and millions of women thrilled to the possibilities of a society ready for reshaping in their capable hands.

But Piercy’s sense of security was rattled by her husband’s eventual desire for an open marriage. She writes honestly of the spouse-swapping days as a time of bisexual discovery, giddy highs followed by sobbing lows.

It was also draining, zapping the energy she needed to pour into her writing, which she pursued with a soldier’s discipline. She finally sent husband No. 2 and his latest love interest packing.

As Piercy found her voice as a poet and novelist, she also found financial security. But fame did not make life easy. She writes poignantly of her belated friendship with her mother just before her death, and her battle to do right by her aging, raging father, who fought her until the day he died.

About the only constants in her life continue to be her need to write and her love of cats -- strays, shelter rescues and pure breeds. The later chapters of her memoir dwell on her happy third marriage to a much younger man and the many cats who have shared their Cape Cod domicile.

A sense of contentment steals over her narrative of life-death cycles, as cats are celebrated for their idiosyncrasies, then buried and mourned. Despite the pall of encroaching blindness, Piercy clings fiercely to the pleasures that remain:

A loving husband, an Eden-like home and a coterie of feline friends who continue to love her for what she is, “an intense, rather angular passionate woman, not easy to like, not easy to live with, even for myself.”

If she has been a better writer than a person, she concludes, so be it. It was her choice. No regrets.