Sleeping with Cats: A Memoir

Rating:
Summary: Whining is not an attractive quality,
Review: even in a writer of Piercy's stature. By the time I was a quarter of the way through the book, I was bored. By the time I was finished, I was ready to write Piercy off . . . but then I re-read her poetry, and was hooked again. So what if I didn't enjoy the story of her life? She probably wouldn't enjoy mine, either. But seriously, this is one autobiography that I'd rather pass in favor of the fiction and poetry.

Rating:
Summary: this book needs some editing
Review: I was attracted to this book because I'm a woman and a cat-lover. I do not know anything about the author but based on review quotes was expecting excellent, entertaining writing. The content is engaging enough, but I noticed that she seems to retell details more often than I suspect she intended. Forgetfulness perhaps? In addition, many paragraphs seem poorly constructed, with her rambling on as though she's just thinking aloud. I'm just a bit disappointed and would not be likely to seek out her other works based on this.

Rating:
Summary: Painful truthfulness
Review: Marge Piercy is well-known for her poetry and for her semi-science fiction novel "Woman on the Edge of Time." She has won literary awards and is certainly an American woman writer of great note. Her honesty and brutal clarity in rendering her memoirs is that more startling, as much of it is unpleasant and she hardly spares herself.

Piercy grew up in a lower class Detroit neighborhood, and was brutally beaten by her father while her needs as an adolescent girl were pretty much ignored by her mother. She found love in girl gangs, had illicit sex with both girls and boys, and yet was accepted to University of Michigan, the best public university in the state. Her career there was as an outsider--she was not the typical well-off, middle class sorority or dorm co-ed with cashmere sweaters and pearls. Instead, Piercy started the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and wrote, winning the prestigious Hopwood writing award at U of M.

Her writing career spanned the times she belonged to communes, then became disenchanted with the increasingly dogmatic Marxist left movement in the 60's. She bounced from Europe to New York to Boston, to Cape Cod, now her home.

In all her writing, Piercy has an uncanny ability to describe her minute observations of place and feeling, a gift attributes to her emotional mother. She expresses the anger at her distant and brutal father, whom she obliquely blames for her mother's death (she had a stroke and he did not call the ambulance service until he had meticulously picked up every fragment of a fluorescent bulb she had broken during her fall.) Her "open marriage" is described with all the ambiguity of such a relationship.

No one writes more grittily, more deeply observant than Piercy--the parts of "Woman on the Edge of Time" where the main character is struggling to leave an insane asylum, are so realistic and troubling, it helps to know Piercy from her memoirs to better understand her craft. If you like Piercy's writing, this memoir is a fine way to get to know her and to gain a better understanding of how she creates her fiction and poetry.