In a dim corner of my local bus interchange is a pub, a pub wherein I spent a laborious year behind the bar. This pub – let’s call it Pub C – which always teetered precariously on the brink of financial collapse – and maybe actual collapse – was propped up by a set of regulars, countable on one’s fingers. Serving these regulars was my first genuine encounter with alcoholics. Their alcoholism was not the passing alcoholism of university debauchery, the standard three-year crash course in hangover cures and morning after pills. Theirs was a grim and lonely alcoholism, more tragic affliction than youthful miscalculation.
Alcoholics are the ideal literary subject. For it is alcohol, readily available and socially acceptable, that everyone, from the shitkicker upwards, has easy access to. In the pages of literature, it will ruin the lives of consuls, mayors, the already down and out, private investigators and law students to name just a few. Their fall from top to bottom or top-of-the-bottom to bottom-of-the-bottom is a readymade tragedy.
The Worcester Sunday Telegram was founded in 1884, when a telegram meant something fast. Two years later, it became a daily. It was never a great paper but it was always a pretty good paper: useful, gossipy, and resolute. It cultivated talent. The poet Stanley Kunitz was a staff writer for the Telegram in the nineteen-twenties. The New York Times reporter Douglas Kneeland, who covered Kent State and Charles Manson, began his career there in the nineteen-fifties. Joe McGinniss reported for the Telegram in the nineteen-sixties before writing “The Selling of the President.” From bushy-bearded nineteenth-century politicians to baby-faced George W. Bush, the paper was steadfastly Republican, if mainly concerned with scandals and mustachioed villains close to home: overdue repairs to the main branch of the public library, police raids on illegal betting establishments—“Worcester Dog Chases Worcester Cat Over Worcester Fence,” as the old Washington press-corps joke about a typical headline in a local paper goes. Its pages rolled off giant, thrumming presses in a four-story building that overlooked City Hall the way every city paper used to look out over every city hall, the Bat-Signal over Gotham.
Most newspapers like that haven’t lasted. Between 1970 and 2016, the year the American Society of News Editors quit counting, five hundred or so dailies went out of business; the rest cut news coverage, or shrank the paper’s size, or stopped producing a print edition, or did all of that, and it still wasn’t enough. The newspaper mortality rate is old news, and nostalgia for dead papers is itself pitiful at this point, even though, I still say, there’s a principle involved. “I wouldn’t weep about a shoe factory or a branch-line railroad shutting down,” Heywood Broun, the founder of the American Newspaper Guild, said when the New York World went out of business, in 1931. “But newspapers are different.” And the bleeding hasn’t stopped. Between January, 2017, and April, 2018, a third of the nation’s largest newspapers, including the Denver Post and the San Jose Mercury News, reported layoffs. In a newer trend, so did about a quarter of digital-native news sites. BuzzFeed News laid off a hundred people in 2017; speculation is that BuzzFeed is trying to dump it. The Huffington Post paid most of its writers nothing for years, upping that recently to just above nothing, and yet, despite taking in a hundred and forty-six million dollars in advertising revenue in 2018, it failed to turn a profit.
Almost everything about losing my voice was ironic. I’m a comedy writer, and my voice loss coincided with the virtual dissolution of my writing career and, with it, my sense of humour. The story actually begins with a humour piece I wrote for The Walrus in December 2007, which led to me being courted by two international literary agents, one from New York City and one from London (UK!). Both encouraged me to write a funny book that they would help sell.
The timing seemed positively karmic, as I had recently suffered a career-slash-nervous breakdown as a result of being trapped in a codependent work relationship with a TV writer/producer I had allowed to run my life for over two years. The promise of one day maybe becoming head writer on the show we were developing had lured me. She had no boundaries when it came work, calling me at all hours of the day, including weekends, to discuss scripts or her latest brainstorm. As a conflict-averse WASP (tautology noted), I had no idea how to stand up to her or for myself. One day, I worked sixteen hours straight while sick to get a draft to her on a Saturday night. The next morning, for the first time in two years, I ignored her call. A few minutes later, I remember listening an angry voice message about how “disappointed” she was, and how I appeared to be losing my “mojo.”
The “orchestra of minorities” refers to the crying of birds mourning the slaughtered among them. It extends, symbolically, to the broader human community of the poor, the dispirited, the silenced, the plundered — those whose spirits have been savaged, those who have been stripped of all dignity, those who risk everything or make impossible journeys to better their lives. It’s a story as old as the epic, but, sadly, an all too modern one.
This deeply eccentric comedy about family connection and loss winds up being both a poignant testament to the struggles of the little guy — and a giddily topsy-turvy tour of how youngsters see their world.
It’s the ultimate irony: Jill Abramson was, indirectly at least, fired because of her resistance to the “innovation report.” And now she’s produced a marvelous book about exactly how prescient the darn thing was.
What’s special about “Cat Person,” and the rest of the stories in “You Know You Want This,” is the author’s expert control of language, character, story — her ability to write stories that feel told, and yet so unpretentious and accessible that we think they must be true.