CAT AND BIRD

A writer’s lessons and insights gleaned from a life spent with cats.

Mori, author of Polite Lies and The Dream of Water, unabashedly admits that her quest for solitude is central to her identity and critical to her contentment. “Both of my parents were charismatic extroverts,” she writes, “and I was the opposite. I looked forward to rainy days so I could play alone in my room.” While the author broaches the subjects of painful family relationships left behind in Japan, her marriage and its dissolution, and a host of personal and professional friendships, her latest book focuses on her series of beloved pet cats. As companions, dependents, and mysterious creatures in their own right, Mori’s cats have given inimitable meaning and an understanding of what it means to bond or be connected in a life otherwise shaped by seclusion. Observing and reflecting on the animals’ patterns of behavior as well as her own attachment to them, the author indicates a profound self-awareness and personal intention, rooted in and driven by her mother’s death by suicide and the author’s subsequent adolescence spent, unhappily, with her father and his new wife. Mori’s style is quiet and subtle, marked by steady pensiveness rather than a rich personal narrative. With sweet, touching humor, she teases metaphors and insights inspired both by her cats and by the birds that she studies and rehabilitates, but she largely leaves these thoughts to be fleshed out by readers. While this approach offers gravitas, it also reflects aloof detachment. As she moves among stories of her cats, jobs, and elements of her past, Mori explores how, in the company of only animals and oneself, one can come to understand many different things that may elude comprehension in larger social settings.

A muted memoir that’s both meandering and meditative.