It may have taken months to pull the proposal together, but it took only a few weeks for the rejections to start coming in from publishers. The writing is wonderful, and I’d love to see more from this author, the typical rejection would begin. But in a crowded pet-memoir marketplace, I just don’t feel that Homer is interesting enough to stand out.
“Crowded marketplace?!” I’d exclaim to my agent. The only other cat memoir at the time was the one about Dewey, the Iowa library cat, and that hadn’t even come out yet.
Ironically, Homer would usually be doing something that I thought was very interesting—or, at a minimum, entertaining—whenever one of these letters would come in. I remember that when I got the first one, Homer had just “liberated” a bag full of catnip toys I’d recently stocked up on. I’d double-wrapped the toys in two plastic bags, hidden those bags inside a duffle bag, and secreted the whole thing underneath a mound of clothes in the bottom of the closet, so that I could distribute them one at a time as the old ones wore out, without the cats’ pestering me to death. But
Homer’s unerring nose had found them anyway. He’d burrowed assiduously into that mound of clothes intended for the laundry—kicking dirty socks and underwear into a heedless pile on the floor behind him—unzipped the duffel bag with his teeth and claws, and torn through the first plastic bag. Looking for all the world like Santa Claus (Santa Claws?), Homer now pranced down the hall and into the living room with the sack of toys between his teeth, the other two cats for once following him eagerly as they waited for him to distribute the booty.
“Not interesting enough?!” Poor Laurence, then my husband-to-be, was generally the only receptacle for my indignation, which waxed hot when I’d receive one of these letters. “The cat has no eyes! Does he need to have no eyes and also learn how to juggle?” I’d demand. “Would that make them happy? Maybe if Homer had no eyes and could ask for his food in perfect sign language like Koko the gorilla.”
That Homer wasn’t “interesting” enough (or some variation of that) was what my agent and I heard most frequently. Also that animal lovers only wanted to read books about dogs and horses; that animal lovers didn’t want to read animal books at all in “our current tech-centric environment;” that animal lovers were only receptive to picture books. One editor informed us matter-of-factly that “cat lovers don’t read books.” Why do you think there aren’t more cat books? he asked with perfect Catch-22 logic. Another said that, sure, maybe cat lovers read books, but they didn’t read memoirs. A third was confident that while cat lovers might read books—and while some of those books might even be memoirs—they definitely didn’t read cat memoirs. (I wish I could say I was making this stuff up.)
By now, I had lost my job as a marketing executive at a magazine company, which had been acquired by another magazine company and then dissolved. The crux of my job had been the analysis of market research on our readers’ consumer-spending habits. The “Marketing Analysis” section I’d written for the Homer’s Odyssey proposal had been exhaustive. I’d provided data on the percentage of cat-owning U.S. households (roughly one third—or, expressed another way, around one hundred million Americans living with at least one cat); the amount of money spent per year by those households on cat-related products and services; and, specifically, the higher-than-average propensity of a wide swath of the U.S. cat-owning population to spend their disposable income on entertainment-related purchases, including dinners out, movie tickets, and books.
“If there’s any hard data out there,” I’d say to Laurence, “supporting the thesis that ‘cat lovers don’t read books,’ I’d be pretty darn interested in seeing it.” (I’m afraid I generally used a saltier word than darn. Forgive me. Those were dark days.)
At this point, our wedding was only a couple of months off, and I was starting to panic. It’s all well and good to get married for richer or poorer, but it still feels awful to enter your marriage without a job or prospects or any viable means of earning an income. Homer was recovering from a recent health scare, the treatment of which had not only eaten into my finances, but had taken its emotional toll on us both. As much as I tried rationally to dismiss the idea, I had the persistent feeling that Homer had gotten sick because I wanted to write about him—that my hubris in thinking ours a story worth sharing publicly had been met by the powers that be with a not-so-gentle rebuke. I was supposed to cherish Homer as he was, the private heart of our own home, and be grateful for that.
It was when things seemed bleakest that I got an electrifying phone call from my agent. A large publishing imprint—one of the biggest and most venerable in the industry—was interested in Homer’s Odyssey. Not only were they interested, they wanted to meet with me in person—along with my agent, a couple of senior editors, the group publisher, and various vice presidents in publicity and marketing. Then my agent said the words that every author dreams of hearing: “They’re talking about a six-figure advance.”
Six figures! Between my unemployed status and upcoming wedding, money was tight. Still, in the week I had before that meeting, I went out and bought a new outfit. I got my hair professionally blown out at a fancy SoHo salon. I invested in a forty-dollar manicure and sixty-dollar pedicure at a high-end spa in the Meatpacking District, rather than relying on the eight-dollar manicures I usually got from an elderly Chinese woman in our apartment building. (I was convinced that senior-level publishing muckety-mucks would be able to tell the difference.) I spent an hour carefully applying my makeup, so it would look like I wasn’t wearing any. I even sprang for a hired car service to take me to the meeting, afraid of relying on the vagaries of afternoon cab availability to get me there on time.
I was already in the car and on my way uptown when I got the call from my agent. Everything had been cancelled. The group publisher (the big boss, basically) hadn’t known what the book was about until shortly before the meeting was supposed to begin. She’d never heard of anything as “creepy” as a cat without eyes, and she was appalled that anyone on her team had considered acquiring Homer’s Odyssey. There was a rumor afloat that she’d gone so far as demoting the senior editor who’d first read the proposal and recommended it for acquisition—as an example to others never to let anything this awful cross her desk again.
“Homer’s Odyssey now has an official body count,” I told Laurence grimly that night, when he got home from work and asked how my meeting had gone.
I’m not sure which hurt worse—the brutality of that last-minute cancellation, after a week of raised hopes and what now seemed like a pathetic level of over-preparation. Or hearing poor Homer, tiny Homer who’d never done a mean thing to anyone in his life, described as “creepy.”
And whose fault is that? I asked myself. Who had subjected Homer to the mockery and derision of ignorant strangers?
I had. I had done it. And even though I knew Homer had no idea that anything unkind had been said about him—or even that such a thing as unkind words existed—those words had opened a wound right in my heart. It hadn’t taken much to revive fears I’d had years ago—the sense that it was my job to safeguard Homer in the disability I’d long-since stopped thinking of that way, to protect him against people who wouldn’t understand him, or who would say ugly things merely because he was different.