Toby, Gus & Me: Choosing a Life Plus Cats with Rebecca van Laer
This week on Cattitude, Michelle Fern chats with writer and critic Rebecca van Laer about her debut memoir, Cat. Van Laer explores how our lives with cats reshape the wild we’ve tried to domesticate—what “tame,” “neuter,” and “indoors” say about nature and about us. She shares why she chose a life plus cats (not kids), and how “undomesticating” herself alongside her senior companions Toby and Gus reframed love, work, and family. From cats’ mysteriously divine histories to millennial burnout in a content-marketing grind, maternal fault lines, and the radical permission in feline laziness and pleasure, Rebecca’s reflections purr with humor and honesty—right down to Gus’s opinion: “I don’t want to be famous…I just want to go to the basement.”
Listen to Episode #281 Now:
BIO:
I’m the author of a novella, How to Adjust to the Dark, and a memoir, Cat. I’m also working on a novel.
My creative writing appears in The New England Review, Joyland, The Florida Review, Bat City Review, Columbia Journal, TriQuarterly, HAD, Salamander, Monkeybicycle, Oyez Review, and elsewhere. Critical writing and interviews are in BOMB, The Creative Independent, Full Stop, the Ploughshares blog, Electric Literature, The Iowa Review, Talking with Animals, and The Rumpus.
I’m an alum of the New York State Summer Writers Institute, the Lighthouse Writers Workshop Lit Fest, and the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop. I hold a Ph.D. in English from Brown University, where I wrote a dissertation on queer and feminist autobiography.
I live in the Hudson Valley with my partner, two cats, and a flock of chickens.
Transcript: