Reviews of books about cats have been a standard element on my blog over the years, and the second annual Reading the Meow challenge, hosted by Mallika of Literary Potpourri, was a good excuse to pick up some more. Tomorrow I’ll review two cat-themed novels; today I have a 2002 memoir that I have been meaning to read for ages.
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. (Secondhand, a gift from my wish list) 
Bookish Beck = Rebecca Foster. American transplant to England. Freelance proofreader and book reviewer.
Bookish Beck 
Since you mentioned you were reading this, I’ve been looking forward to hearing about your experience with it. I haven’t finished reading and I’m not sure I ever will (you can probably imagine exactly where my bookmark has gotten lodged) but it’s also one of the books I’ve stubbornly clung to and I hope it’s on my shelves forever. And I think I’ve read all but one of her novels and some of them a few times (and much of her poetry). If you have most of her backlist ahead of you, you’re in for a treat. (Surely she’s readily available second-hand, in the U.S. if not where you are just now.) She’s a wonder.
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I technically started reading this in March 2021, so it took me a while as well! (Though I think I was paused at p. 50-something for about the first three years of that.) Jeez, I don’t know, was it when she performed her own abortion?! Gruesome. I have only read the one novel of hers, though I own a copy of Vida, so that will be next. And I’ve only been able to access two poetry collections. What else would you recommend most highly? The university library has a few other novels, and for the rest I’ll be going secondhand. I was amazed to look her up and find that she’s still blogging regularly and has a book awaiting publication.
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Haha, that’s funny. Did you have to reread or did it still feel fresh? You can find some of her poetry collections on openlibrary.org especially the harder-to-find (likely loooong OP) ones. And, actually, some of the very early novels, including Vida. Most people probably say Gone to Soldiers as a fave, cuz it’s massive and complex, with all the povs (or Woman on the Edge of Time, if they prioritise SFF) and they’re very good, but my favourites are not necessarily the best but the ones with characters who really appealed to me (even though they’re all flawed and often not particularly likeable): Small Changes, Summer People, Braided Lives. She’s unstoppable! I’m so glad she’s still actively writing (though I never felt the same attachment to her later fiction).
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I briefly skimmed back through and it was all so bizarre that it was still pretty familiar to me.
How did I not know about Open Library?? This could be a game changer! I always thought Internet Archive was vaguely dodgy, but I guess not.
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Internet Archive saved my thesis this week! I was facing the possibility of having to spend £250 for print on demand editions of some primary texts (five obscure novels from the 1790s) if I wanted personal copies, as opposed to reference library ones I can’t check out and would have had to have scanned. IA had every single one of them.
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That’s awesome! For super-old stuff it doesn’t seem like a problem. I guess it relies on literally one library that holds a copy digitizing it and making it available. It’s where it’s more recent stuff that might still be in copyright that I wonder if it’s dodgy to offer free electronic downloads. But if it functions as a library and gets the author even tiny royalties, then that’s okay too.
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The newer books that I’ve seen are usually marked either Preview Only or Not in Library but, then, I’m always looking for something that I can’t find in a local library, rather than something new, so I can’t say for sure if this is circumstantial or policy-related.
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She certainly seems to have had quite the life — interesting in its own right even minus the cats (good to hear she’s active and writing even now). But of course the cats do make it more special as they do everything they enter into. Thanks for this review Rebecca. I hadn’t come across Marge Piercy before but must look her work up. Looking forward to seeing what novels you’ve picked as well!
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I’m so pleased I could introduce you to her! (One of tomorrow’s choices is more obviously cat-themed than the other, but the cover swayed me.)
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Haha! As I read your last sentence, I thought it was your cat who is second hand. Even though I’m not a Cat Lady (I have two daughters filling that role) the Marge Piercy looks worth a punt.
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Oops. Well, technically he is, perhaps third-hand even: we got him from Battersea Cats and Dogs Home in Windsor and he’d been in there more than once. The previous owners had brought him back because he was so annoying 😉 So you can’t say we weren’t warned!
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I’ve enjoyed both of the Piercy novels I’ve read (Woman on the Edge and Body of Glass, also published as He, She and It)—had no idea her life was this full and unconventional, though! What a woman. Those are great excerpts. I fear that I’ve made the opposite choices in some ways: that I have sacrificed, to an extent, artistic production for love, or security, or prioritised being a good person over being a good writer (insofar as I can be said to be a good person). But maybe those choices are functions of who we are. Maybe security and love is the thing that I need the most and the rest flows from that.
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I don’t know a thing about any of her other fiction, so it will be fun to explore.
Life is long! At some points Piercy felt she’d made the wrong decisions, marrying twice despite misgivings (third time’s a charm?) and wasting time managing quirky commune-type households. You wrote a novel at, what, 25? And you’re well on your way to a PhD, which will likely turn into a monograph. It can take a frustrating amount of time to get where we need to be. I try not to regret the journey.
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Well, that’s cheered me up a good bit! Thinking about it that way is perhaps more helpful. It’s the journey. Thanks 🙂
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Very wise words, Rebecca!
This actually sounds great and, not being keen on animal-focused books in general, I’d never have picked it up from the cover and title, so thanks for bringing it to my attention.
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Aww, glad I could cheer you up. You still seem so young to me, yet so much more on top of things than I was in my early thirties! Things seem to be going well for you personally and career-wise.
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Aw, thank you. It feels very fragmented at the moment–things are progressing but I haven’t got the sense of having arrived anywhere yet–so it’s good to remember that things progressing counts as achievement.
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And thanks to Laura. I hope at least a bit of wisdom has come with age and that I can share it with the bookish little sisters I never had 🙂
I do think you’d find Piercy’s work interesting at least as a historical curio, with her involvement in feminist groups.
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Ah, this is so lovely! We are a bookish sisterhood 🙂
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I went through a Marge Piercy phase in the ’90s when I was a bookseller. Her books sold surprisingly solidly then, given I live in a small British provincial city albeit with lots of tourists. I’m going to check if she’s still stocked next time I’m in a bookshop. I’d no idea her life was such an interesting one.
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I’d be astonished if many of her books are still in print. I know The Women’s Press brought some of them out here.
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Waterstones lists 5 in stock for Woman on the Edge and suggests they can order a few titles but that’s it.
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So that’s the one that’s stood the test of time! She doesn’t talk about it as if it’s her best or favourite.
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I’ve a fairly random selection on my shelves but didn’t keep all I read. You’ve prompted me to find out more about her life.
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I read Women on the Edge of Time and then more or less forgot all about her, how wonderful to hear all about her amazing life and that she is still blogging! Thank you for putting her back into the front of my brain!
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Ripe for rediscovery! Let me know if you try something else by her.
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I don’t know why I thought Marge Piercy was Canadian.
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Were you thinking of Margaret Laurence, maybe?
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That’s it! That means I haven’t read any Margaret Piercy.
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I’ve never heard of her, but it sounds like she was ahead of her time. And that passage about old cats made me tear up. My 4 year old cat Perogy is sort of like an old cat now, after her injuries – she has recovered, but she’s slowed down a lot. And she sure is precious 🙂
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Woman on the Edge of Time definitely made me think she was ahead of her time.
I’m delighted to hear that Perogy is still with you. The poor thing has been through a lot. I saw an age chart that told me my 16-year-old cat is the equivalent of an 80-year-old person. It explains why he’s such a grump!
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Good stuff here! She was right to stay childless if that was her conviction. No one else can decide that for you. I’m loving all the Meow reviews. I have one more that “might” make it Sunday, but probably Wednesday of next week.
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Lots of cat-loving bibliophiles out there 🙂
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[…] Reading the Meow challenge, hosted by Mallika of Literary Potpourri, after yesterday’s review of Sleeping with Cats by Marge Piercy. One of the below novels is obviously cat-themed; the other less so, but the cover […]
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I knew her first as a poet because I somehow discovered her book The Moon is Always Female back when I was in high school, I think? I read one or two of her novels but can’t remember which ones. She was certainly ahead of her time if she’s in her late 80’s. The graphic for Reading the Meow is adorable!
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I really like her poetry too. The first collection I read was Available Light, which is fantastic. I stumbled on that one at a secondhand bookshop for £1 and I have that random discovery to thank for these other great experiences I’ve had with her work.
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I’ll look for that one! Maybe my library has it.
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