Writing Between the Lines: The story of a cat

Thoughts and Musings

We readers don’t need the writer to tell us how she felt about it. Like a punch in the gut, that simple stark fact sends us straight to the howling, unspeakable grief produced by the conflation of these two disasters, the loss of her marriage and, we have to say, the much bigger loss of her true soulmate, the cat. We don’t need her to tell us, either here or through the whole ten chapters of this section, that her cat companion was superior to her human one in every way imaginable: sensitivity, loyalty, kindness, moral character, intelligence. All that is abundantly clear from the straightforward evidence of these traits that she provides. She doesn’t need to say, Wow, wasn’t Matilda smart to figure out how to open the refrigerator door in the service of labeling and shaming disgraceful human behavior? All that she leaves to us, and we believe it much more deeply by figuring it out ourselves than we would by being told. We see the incredible cat continue to unfold new and amazing abilities as the humans stay locked in their destructive downward spiral.