It will be hard to know these things in the chaos of that moment in which they’re happening, when decisions have to be made. I know that firsthand. But if you pause for a moment, take a deep breath, and listen to your cat, he will tell you.
I’ve spent far more time discussing this here than I do in the book itself. First and foremost, this is a book of stories—stories about a cat who rose from obscurity to fame, who was promoted from barely tolerated baby brother to adored “big kid,” and who continues to save the lives of other animals to this day, simply because he lived and his story was told.
Thank you for the gift of letting me tell these stories—and for the additional, greater gift of keeping Homer alive. As long as there is you, there will be him.
Gwen Cooper
New York, NY
November 26, 2015
CONTENTS
“Cat Lovers Don’t Read Books”— 11
The World’s Cat— 36
Strong Like Bull— 59
The End of the Beginning— 89
“Cat Lovers Don’t Read Books”
There is no accounting for luck; Zeus gives prosperity to
rich and poor just as he chooses, so you must take what
he has seen fit to send you and make the best of it.
-HOMER, The Odyssey
FAMOUS CATS WEREN’T A THING LIKE THEY ARE TODAY, back when I first began writing the proposal and outline for Homer’s Odyssey in 2007. There were no cat cafes. Cat videos hadn’t yet taken over the internet. The “Friskies 50” list of the internet’s fifty most influential cats was years away not only from execution, but from any relevance. Everybody knew about famous animated cats, like Felix, Tom, Sylvester, the Aristocats, and the perennial Hello Kitty. I remembered a movie from childhood called That Darn Cat! There were celebrity cats like Morris and the elegant Fancy Feast Persian, although they were “played” by a succession of different cats, more brand icons than actual felines. A fictional kitty named Sneaky Pie Brown starred in a series of cozy mystery novels. But there didn’t seem to be any real-life famous cats, cats who were also members of real-life human families.
There was, however, a cat I’d read about in a recent newspaper article—a cat who’d lived in a library in small-town Iowa, and whose human caregiver had just sold a proposal for a book about his life for more than a million dollars.
My own first book, a novel about South Beach, had been published a few months earlier. Now I was trying to figure out a second book. I didn’t think I could earn anything close to a million dollars for any book idea I might have, but I remember putting down the newspaper and looking across the living room at Homer—who was, at the time, visible only from the waist down, the upper half of his body buried under the sofa as he struggled to retrieve an intriguing new belled toy that had rolled away from him—and thinking, I’ll bet I could write a book about Homer. Homer’s a pretty cool cat…
Once I had the idea, I couldn’t shake it loose—as if it had always been waiting there for me to unearth. Over the next few weeks, I started jotting down notes and writing out some preliminary paragraphs. I was still working full-time in an office, so I wrote in the pre-dawn hours of early morning—hours when Homer himself was the most active, sparking ideas and connections to half-forgotten memories of our earliest life together. Mornings were when Homer was likeliest to decide to use the toilet instead of the litter-box, to chase his big sisters down the hall (Wait up, you guys!), or to disrupt my writing with a preemptory head-bonk as he sat down smack in the middle of the computer keyboard, leaving me to wonder for the millionth time how a blind cat—just like any “normal” cat—infallibly knew when I was looking at a book or a newspaper or a computer screen, at anything rather than at him, and made up his mind to put an immediate end to that.
At the end of two months, I had enough written down to show my L.A.-based literary agent. He was decidedly underwhelmed by the whole thing. Those who’ve read the Afterword to the paperback edition of Homer’s Odyssey may recall that his initial response was, “But why would anybody want to read this?”
“Because a lot of people like cats?” I’d been so flummoxed by his question that I heard myself phrasing my answer—a statement I knew for a fact to be true—as if it, too, were a question, the answer to which I was unsure of. “Because Homer is blind and interesting and has an inspirational life story?”
My agent was blunt. “The writing is there, but I don’t think it’s a good idea. I wouldn’t be able to take it to editors.”
I didn’t just pay my agent to make deals for me—I also paid him for his career advice. He knew the publishing industry better than I did, and choosing to move forward with my blind-cat book against that advice was easier said than done.
I took to Google, trying to get a sense of how many others like me there might be out there—people who were also living with blind and “special-needs” cats. I ended up calling a woman named Alana Miller, who ran an organization called Blind Cat Rescue in North Carolina. We talked for a while about the plight of blind cats, the barriers they faced in finding adoptive homes, the way so many were summarily euthanized in open-intake shelters. We agreed—perhaps idealistically, but with utter sincerity—that if a book like this could save even one of them, it would be worth the effort of having written it.
I’d already been working with the notion of blind leaps of faith as being one of the central themes of this embryo book, and I decided to take one now. Thank you so much for everything you’ve done for me, and for being the first person to have confidence in me as a writer, I wrote to my agent a few days later. But we see my proposed HOMER’S ODYSSEY project so very differently that I believe it’s in our mutual best interests to part ways.
I didn’t know many other writers who could refer me to their agents, so I went back to what I had done to find my first one—sending blind query letters and emails “over the transom” (meaning without a referral from another client). But this time I didn’t have to wait close to a year to hear back, as I had with the first book. Within only a few weeks, a senior agent with a prestigious New York literary agency pronounced herself intrigued by both the writing and the story as I’d outlined it, despite being a self-professed “dog person.” My confidence was bolstered by this—that I wasn’t just getting the, Awwwwww…Homer’s a cute kitty! endorsement—and also by how quickly I’d found an agent this time. Surely, I told myself, this could only auger good things. The two of us spent the next four or five months working together closely on an outline, a full proposal, and two sample chapters. We went back and forth over whether those sample chapters should simply be the first two chapters—or perhaps the story of Homer chasing off the burglar? Passages about Homer catching flies in mid-air? Homer and his Kleenex guitar? Final decisions were eventually made, and it was just after Memorial Day of 2008 when we decided we were ready to share Homer’s Odyssey—at least in its broad strokes—with others.