First published in The Times on 19 November 2020
Mary Gaitskill’s Lost Cat is a slim, sorrowful book about the loss of a slim, scrappy animal — except it’s about much more than that, of course. Really, it’s a look at how pain can be displaced: unmanageable grief can be suppressed more or less successfully for years, only to re-emerge unexpectedly elsewhere — in this case, bobbing to the surface when a new pet goes missing.
Kentucky-born Gaitskill has been publishing short stories and novels for more than three decades, and her older work is enjoying a revival with younger generations: her debut collection, 1988’s Bad Behavior, became a Penguin Modern Classic last year, and 1997’s Because They Wanted To has followed suit this month. Lost Cat, which first appeared in the literary magazine Granta in 2009, is something different; a piece of memoir, as slippery and hard to contain as a feral animal.
On a writing retreat in Italy, Gaitskill is persuaded — not that it takes much persuasion — to adopt a half-blind stray kitten that she calls Gattino. She and her husband return with Gattino to their home in upstate New York, where she begins to nurture it into sturdier health, but two and a half months later the cat disappears. This triggers a tireless search, in which Gaitskill puts out traps, posts flyers, calls vets and scours the snow for paw prints.
She is still looking a year later, obsessed; she consults numerous psychics and on the advice of one of them calls Italy to seek someone from Gattino’s home turf who might practise magic. Meanwhile, she collects the excrement of her other cats and scatters it around her yard, hoping that the familiar smell will lure the kitten back to home territory.
Gradually and with great skill the writer paints in the backdrop that makes sense of this madness; the idea of the cat has somehow become entwined with that of her father, who had died a slow, painful death of cancer. “My mother had left him years before; my sisters and I tended to him, but inadequately, and too late,” she writes. He was a difficult man, and she regretted that they never managed much honest communication; now she feels that the pain she is suffering is a message from him, an echo of what he went through.
The cat is also a reminder of her struggles with “her” children. They are two kids who came into her and her husband’s lives via a sort of mentoring scheme; poor urban children sent to wealthier households for holidays in the countryside. Gaitskill writes unflinchingly about her devotion to Caesar and Natalia, a brother and sister into whom she has spent years pouring energy: sending gifts, conducting long phone calls, taking Natalia horse riding and paying for them to attend a Catholic school. Away from her, the children live a brutal life in the city and are routinely beaten by their mother. As readers we watch Gaitskill’s desperation to make everything better, while the growing children become less and less able to show the softness she is looking for.
In one simple passage it becomes clear that this is why the loss of the cat is so devastating; it represents the other failures of Gaitskill’s love. “It is hard to protect a person you love from pain, because people choose pain; I am a person who often chooses pain. An animal will never choose pain; an animal can receive love far more easily than even a very young human. And so I thought it should be possible to shelter a kitten with love.” She describes the feeling that Gattino has torn her heart open, and now everything else is uncontainable.
All this makes for a rather affecting read, with Gaitskill seesawing between grief and a doomed aspiration to rescue the cat, or the children, and in doing so repair mistakes of the past. Like many mourners, she is haunted by wishful thinking, superstition and nightmares; what she once considered a lucky blue marble comes to be seen as a bad omen, and in a dream about Caesar he opens his mouth to reveal the sharp teeth of a kitten.
Gaitskill’s self-portrait feels resolutely honest rather than flattering; her efforts to find Gattino read as increasingly unhinged, and we are with her when she questions the appropriateness of her interventions in the children’s lives. But what she describes — the relentless human hope that love can fix what has gone before — can be recognised by us all.
Lost Cat by Mary Gaitskill, Daunt, 89pp; £8.99