They want to experience, in other words, the Magic of a special animal named Dewey Readmore Books, a cat that somehow, from inside the walls of a small Iowa library, managed to touch the world. As I said at the beginning, all of this is for and because of Dewey. There would have been no book without him. As the young woman from Florida wrote, each reader of the book experienced Dewey’s Magic in their own lives, even though they never met him in person.
So Dewey lives! Even though he has gone, he lives as a memory, a reminder, an example of what’s right in the world. Most importantly, I realized as I read letters day after day, he lives in all the other animals that share his tenderness, playfulness, attentiveness, and devotion. My favorite fact from the letters was that 30 percent came from male fans, including two cat-loving sheriffs, and they all started “I’m sure you never receive any letters from men. ...” Don’t worry, real men love cats, too! But the most important thing I read over and over again was this: Dewey touched my heart, because he reminded me of my own pet.
Slowly, it dawned on me that Dewey had tapped into the deep love people around the world feel for their animals. And that Dewey, the book, had given these people something just as important: a way to share that love. In a way, I think, the book made it acceptable to tell a stranger, even if that stranger was only me: “I love my cats. They are important. They are my friends. They’ve changed my life. When they die, I miss them terribly.” As a young man wrote, after telling me of how broken he felt after a difficult divorce and how his two cats had been the only bright spot in an otherwise dismal time:
At first I thought to myself, my God, how can I love two animals so much? There must be something wrong with me. My life must be so empty. I was embarrassed to admit to myself how important these cats were in my life. Then I read your book and realized there was nothing wrong with loving an animal to the depths that I do. In a way, your book made it okay for me to love my cats the way I do and it made it okay for me to explore our love further, to deepen our relationship and intertwine our lives even more.
Thank you.
For so long, the word people conjured when they heard about a deep relationship between a cat and a person was: sad. But I was passionate about my cat. And I wasn’t the only one. Not even close. I think Dewey, through his generosity of spirit and endearing personality—through the Magic of his life in a small-town library—became a symbol of that vital connection so many human beings feel with the animals in their lives.
In Dewey’s Nine Lives, you will read nine stories of extraordinary cats and the people who loved them. Three of the chapters are set in or around Spencer, Iowa, and feature Dewey stories that didn’t make it into the first book—because I didn’t know of them at the time. The other six stories are about people who wrote to me after reading Dewey. They are the purest of contributors: fans who wrote only to express their admiration and love for Dewey and their own animals, expecting nothing in return.
Are these the best stories that could have come out of those three thousand letters? I don’t know. In most cases, after all, I was reacting to a sentence or two.
“We housed homeless and abused cats on a foster home basis. ...”
“He survived a coyote attack, a smack by a bear, walking thirty miles to return to me after a vindictive woman took him to another place just to hurt me.”
“I have never been loved by anyone, not even my daughter or my parents, the way I have been loved by my Cookie.”
When my cowriter and I followed up on the letters with phone calls, we heard stories about people and cats that were completely unexpected. Some were better. Some worse. All were genuine, heartfelt stories about real people and their animals. After Dewey, people advised me to write about the cat found in a sofa donated to the Goodwill, or the burned cat they saw on the local news, or the one-eyed, lop-eared cat that lived his whole life in a Chicago beer bar. But I thought: Why? What’s the connection with Dewey? Those are cute stories, but where is the love? If I’m going to tell other stories, I want them to be based on the same foundation as Dewey: the special bond between a cat and a person. I wanted to write stories about people whose lives had been changed by their love for their cat.
The people in this book don’t think of themselves as heroes. They didn’t do anything, as I like to say, that would get them on the Today show or the morning news. They are ordinary people, leading ordinary lives, with ordinary animals. I can’t tell you if theirs are the best stories in those letters, but I can assure you of this: I like every person in this book. They are the kind of people I grew up with in Spencer, and they are the kind of people I want as my friends. Together with their cats, they embody everything I believe Dewey stood for: kindness, perseverance, morality, hard work, and the strength to always, no matter what the circumstances, stay true to your values and yourself. If the resonance of Dewey’s story was based in part on its values, then I wanted these people to reflect those values, too. And I think they do. I am proud to have gotten to know every one of them.
I can’t tell you that you will like every action taken by the people in this book. You will not, because I don’t agree with some of them myself. As hard as I try, for instance, I cannot condone the fact that Mary Nan Evans didn’t have her cats spayed sooner. I just can’t. Others let their cats roam outside, even though it is well known that this shortens their life expectancy. Some cats might seem too pampered, or smothered, or anthropomorphized. I know there will be objections. After all, I received hate mail after my first book because I let Dewey eat Arby’s Roast Beef sandwiches in his last year of life. I loved that cat with all my heart; I gave everything I could to him; he lived nineteen wonderful years—nineteen!—and yet people still harassed me and called me a murderer because, at the end of his life, in an act of mercy that tore the heart right out of my chest, I put him to sleep.
If you feel the temptation to criticize, please stop and think of this: Every person in this book loved their animals, fiercely and deeply. Every one of them acted in the best interest, as they understood it, of the animals they loved. If they made decisions you disagree with, that is not an indictment of their character. They are simply different from you. Or they lived in a different time, with a different understanding of how animals and people thrive together. Or, very often, both. No story has been changed for this book. Nothing has been glossed over. This is not The Cat Whisperer or a guide to kitten care. This is a collection of stories about the way real cats and real people live.