When I tell people that I’ve written a book about my cats, they often ask if it’s a children’s book or a humor book. One person who had read my first book—a cross-genre novella with a healthy dose of literary theory—asked if it featured cartoons. I understand that this is where the mind goes when someone thinks of cats: to the silly, the cute, the cozy. After all, our Instagram feeds are populated by cat memes.
This assumption bothers me to no end. I want another language to talk about my book; I want to do an interview where I don’t talk about cats at all. I wrote about two years of my life with my partner and our decision not to have kids; I wrote a book about making a family in the age of climate collapse. But, of course, it’s called Cat, and the story is impossible to tell without talking about our nonhuman family members. If you order it, the algorithm will serve you content about cats, not species decline.
And, aside from my book, the history of feline literature already shows that our relationships to cats are not always tender and sweet. Cats are complex creatures, and so are we. When we move beyond coziness, we better understand our history not just with cats but with animalia writ large. These six books do just that.
Japanese cat novels are a genre all their own, and the most recent entrants are undeniably sweet, with humans and felines finding comfort in each other. So it’s all the more interesting that the genre’s inaugural text, published serially between 1905 and 1906, is so much less saccharine. I Am a Cat is narrated from the point of view of a nameless cat who is often subject to indifference and outright abuse by the schoolteacher he lives with. Written as a satire of the middle class, I Am a Cat is also a story about feigned affinity—for literature, for thought, for nonhuman creatures.
Poet’s Square by Courtney Gustafson
When Courtney Gustafson and her boyfriend move to a new neighborhood in Tucson, they notice more and more cats emerging in their yard. Eventually, the booming population of feral cats inspires Gustafson to become a TNR volunteer and cat advocate. These stories of thirty rescued cats are filled with tenderness and affection, but also a keen awareness of the suffering our society inflicts on those who need care, both animal and human.
The Butter House by Sarah Gerard
This slim volume is, dare I say, cat-like in its quietude and constraint. A couple moves to a new house with their formerly unintegrated cats and begins to introduce them. Meanwhile, they immediately begin spotting cats outside, naming them, and forming attachments. Toward the end of this mysterious tale, the girlfriend opens a volume from the local library that argues cats are little more than sentient props in their owner’s lives—and she suddenly sees her affection in a funhouse mirror, distorted and grotesque. This paragraph haunts the book, and, I’ll admit, me.
This memoir is considered a classic for cat lovers, so I imagine most readers are surprised that it opens with two scenes of cat murder. Lessing’s childhood experiences of wild cats, feral cats, and an out-of-control population in Iran and Zimbabwe shape her affection for the pampered cats she keeps in her adult London home. But Lessing’s undercurrent of anxiety about cats is one of the most interesting things about this memoir. There is an echo of that early violence in her adult reluctance to neuter her pets, an ongoing inability to fully take responsibility for the creatures she professes to love more than anything. In her contradictions, we can see some of our own.
In the world of this sci-fi novel, ants develop a technology that turns housecats into large, bipedal creatures with human intelligence. In their new state, former housecats like protagonist Mort(e) recognize their oppression and literal castration at the hands of humankind, collaborating with ants to kill their former oppressors. This sounds just as wild as it is. More than that, it reflects on all we inflict on cats and other creatures in the name of love and protection, exposing the same anxieties as other books on this list, although taking them to a more extreme end.
This book is brutal. At the outset, Hrabal and his wife have a country home in Czechia, frequented by five cats who are “theirs,” although only allowed indoors when they’re visiting. Outdoors, they are subject to the elements—and to cat hunters. But they are also free, and especially free to breed. The dueling impulses to protect and to control the growing cat population tear Hrabal apart. The book contains all the kinds of violence against cats that we ascribe to adolescent psychopaths, but somehow worse because the author, a passionate cat lover, perpetrates it. This is hard to read, but when so many people keep letting their cats outside, keep them unneutered, and keep the feral cat crisis out of sight and out of mind, it’s all the more necessary to confront it.
About the Author
Rebecca van Laer holds a PhD in English from Brown University, where she studied queer and feminist autobiography. Her novella, How to Adjust to the Dark (2022) has been praised in the Millions, Nylon, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, and other venues.