Animal behaviorists, doting owners and even Hollywood stars have all immortalized their beloved cats in memoir — or “meowmoir” as one critic has called the genre — but with his addition to the genre, Peter Trachtenberg, whose previous works include the acclaimed “The Book of Calamities,” brings a distinctive literary bent to the subject as he explores just what it means to love these stealth creatures.
His new book, “Another Insane Devotion,” is being hailed as one of the “best books written about what it means to love cats.” It traces a familiar lost-and-found storyline after Trachtenberg’s tabby goes missing while he’s away teaching, but he gets into deeper philosophical territory as he confronts the notion of losing his kitty at the same time his marriage to fellow writer Mary Gaitskill is falling apart.
We caught up with the 59-year-old writer, who has since reunited with Biscuit, and talked to him about the crazy kind of love we have for our feline pets.
You said that the book is really a meditation on love. Do you think it’s easier to love a pet than a human?
Yes. Our pets’ needs are simpler; they can’t talk, so we never know how shallow or selfish or mean-spirited they really are. Also, they forgive us in a way that most people don’t. Some pets run away, it’s true, but they don’t sue us for divorce and demand half the property. Still, I don’t think our love for our pets is ever as deep or rich or complex as our love for our partners, lovers or friends; maybe because animals are easier. When all you lift is an 8-pound barbell — Biscuit weighs less than 8 pounds — you don’t get the kind of pecs you get lifting one that weighs 125.
Do you think Biscuit loves you as strongly as you love her?
If I’m being honest, I have no idea how deeply Biscuit loves me, or if she loves me at all. What she feels for me may not correspond to what I’ve felt for other humans. It certainly looks like love to me. I can’t say she’d go 700 miles to look for me if I went missing, but a friend who knows animals theorized that that may be exactly why she wandered off. I’d gone away, she had no idea where, and no understanding that it was only temporary, so she went looking for me.
How do you think loving a cat and loving a dog differs?
Dogs race to greet you at the door; they jump up and plant their paws on your chest, they muzzle your crotch, they bring you things they want you to throw to them or to try to pull from their mouths… They look at you with eyes brimming with meaning, and the wonderful thing about that meaning is you don’t have to interpret it; it’s obvious.
Cats are more veiled. Cats signal you in their own terms. If you lock eyes with a cat for too long, it’s a sign of aggression. You learn to read those signs — you learn their vocabulary. But my book is also about incomprehension. With Biscuit, was I just projecting? With my wife was I projecting? How well do you really know someone else?
You talk about how pets help us learn to grieve. How is that?
For most children, or maybe I should say for lucky children, a pet represents the first real loss, the first time something they love dies. So they very literally teach us how to grieve. That wasn’t true for me — I didn’t get my first cat until I was in my 30s — but the loss I felt when my first cat died was very childlike. I cried more than I did when my parents died, without self-consciousness. Maybe everyone who loses a beloved pet becomes a child again for a while. That isn’t the case when one loses a parent. One becomes more of a grownup.