(courtesy Harper Collins Publishers Australia)
Life is all about playing parts.
That’s not to say that’s healthy, unless of course you’re an actor in which case have at it and then some, but the reality is that, for a whole of reasons, many of us spend our days unconsciously being whoever we think we should be to survive this thing called life.
Sometimes it’s matter of emotional or physical survival, a reaction to trauma whose origins are long since blurred in the past or it’s simply a way to cope with unpalatable reality but whatever its cause, it can leave us living a lie, often one we are not even remotely aware we are living.
Mia is one such person, the titular Cat Lady in Dawn O’Porter’s latest novel, who, naturally enough has a called Pigeon whom she rescue off the streets more than a decade earlier and whose appearance in Mia’s life marks the demarcation line between a traumatic child- and young adulthood, and a far more ordered, some might say sclerotic adult life.
With Pigeon very firmly the focus of her carefully assembled world, Mia plays her parts to perfection.
She is a loving wife (well, within certain limits), a doting stepmother (though she’s careful not to overstep the boundary into actual motherhood) and a manager who keeps her employees humming along efficiently (she may be a tad uptight; just a tad) and who knows well enough to have her breakfast before she comes to work because what sort of barbarian wouldn’t?
There is a reason I have built routine and organisation into my life. Without it I have the kind of mind that could get me into a lot of trouble.
She has her entire life working in an orderly fashion within certain prescribed lines, and as far as she’s concerned, it’s all very normal and exactly what any other healthy person would do.
But do emotionally and mentally healthy people attend a pet bereavement group while the object of their pet-owning affection in very much in the land of the furry living?
Do they allow the ex-wife of her husband a key to the house and free rein into daily family life?
And do they silently but scornfully judge the people who work for them because they dare to do things, anything like living quite ordinarily messy lives and arriving to work a little late and drinking coffee before they log-on?
Possibly not but then much of the fun of Cat Lady is that Mia, god bless her, doesn’t realise she’s papered over copious amounts of trauma with a wafer-thin gauze of barely-in-place order until one wholly destructive life rips her artfully constructed, some might say, suffocatingly precise house of cards down, leaving her wondering what part it is she’s meant to play and who she really is when you peel away all the hurt and the loss and the grief and a thousand other layers of broken personhood.
Mia has a lot on her plate all of sudden, and as might suspect, she doesn’t handle it all that well which is just as well for us because her journey from acting the part to living authentically is one hell of an hilarious but emotionally affecting ride.
(courtesy official Dawn O’Porter Instagram account)
The joy of Cat Lady is how beautifully O’Porter weaves together some very funny, over-the-top moments, all draped in some very dark humour that wears its trauma amusingly well, and the graphic sadness of a person who only ever wanted to feel comfortable in her own skin and life but who never really got the chance.
The source of that trauma is best left to the reading of this movingly quirky novel, but safe to say that if you have even a smidgen of trauma in your background, and it’s rare to find a person who doesn’t, you will find a great deal with which to identify with in Cat Lady.
Who of us hasn’t at some point or other draped ourselves in our hopes and expectations for life and kept wearing even when it becomes obvious that they are no longer even remotely fit for purpose?
When you’ve worn who you want to be and not who you are for that long, it can be hard to work out where one ends and the other begins and much of the pleasure in this novel is seeing how very badly navigates her way through the resultant what’s-real, what’s-not chaos.
Not because you take joy in another person’s emotional misfortune but because Mia is every single last damn one of us, someone who thought she was living authentically and well until she discovered she was most definitely not.
I also buy a bottle of Maker’s Mark because it’s the one spirit I can drink without a mixer and who needs the trouble of cups and measurements when feelings need to be drowned and problems need to be ignored. I have no idea what I’ll do after this. But even if I have to sit here drinking on this bench for days, I will, eventually, think of something.
Of course, we’d all like to think we’d handle that kind of cataclysmic disruption like a therapeutic textbook or a film-of-the-week which ends in epiphanic inspiration, but when has that ever really happened in real life?
Outside of Hollywood or a mental health professional’s scientific paper, journeys from brokenness to as close as any of us manage who wholeness are all-round horrifically undignified affairs, full of misplaced choices, back steps by the truckload and a sliding sense that we might never work out which way is up ever again.
The joke is that we didn’t know which way was up to begin with, and much of the emotional power and humour of Mia’s story comes from the fact that what happens to her feels so freeingly relatable.
She’s faced with a choice many of us come to – keep living the lie or bust it wide open and do the messy but fruitful work of working out who you really are and living the hell out of that truth – and she handles it about as well as any of is would.
Which is to say not very well at all … until, thankfully, she does.
That she lands on her feet may not be much of a surprise but how she get there is, and O’Porter writes her with heart, understanding and truth and a glorious sense that this way we all go as we, to borrow from the backcover blurb, claw our way out from under the weight pf ill-fitting guise that never really worked for us, anyway.
Funny and moving in equal measure, Cat Lady is brilliant because it calls life for what it is, a lot of smoke and mirrors from which an escape isn’t easy but possible, and it addresses the trauma with empathy and good humour, in so doing reminding us that, hard though life can be, it’s far richer and enlivening to live life your way even if the getting there might be a whole other adventure you’d rather avoid.