Diane Lovejoy

Diane Lovejoy’s Cat Lady Chronicles would make a lovely gift for any cat lover. The illustrated-board cover features an exquisite Japanese woodblock of a black-and-white cat skulking behind a tomato plant. Inside are 31 color plates of paintings, prints, drawings, and photographs of cats and their people, all from museum collections.

This is not simply a picture book, but a lovely little memoir. We all have those moments that transform our lives, and for Lovejoy, one of those moments was when a cat adopted her. Married with no children, dedicated to her professional life as a publications director for a major art museum, and an orderly person, Lovejoy writes, “My steady routines were thrown for a loop when, twelve years ago, I found an emaciated feline in our backyard.” From there, we find how she and her husband became co-residents with ten cats and how they have managed to keep their census at ten, even though family, friends, and neighbors—and assorted free-ranging kitties—consider them the go-to place to shelter abandoned or otherwise homeless cats.

Everyone with pets knows how they can organize, disorganize, and permanently alter your life. Lovejoy, who had been a quiet, self-contained person all her life is no different. “I was relating better to people because of my ability to relate to cats,” she writes.

Tips on being a dedicated cat owner—from whimsical to practical—are scattered throughout the text, bordered with a paw-print design. Though I found these interesting and informative, their placement distracted from the narrative. I would have found them more beneficially placed as a collection in an appendix or otherwise separate section at the back of the memoir text.

While Cat Lady Chronicles is well written and quite appealing, its excitement score isn’t high enough to help me over the bumps of a couple of editorial choices. Over the past 20 years or so, comma usage has evolved to a minimalist, use-it-as-you-need-it art. By this measuring stick, Lovejoy’s text is rampant with overused commas—not incorrectly used, just unnecessarily used. This tried-and-true, conservative approach to commas is in sharp contrast to runaway ofs, used in a manner only recently accepted in American writing. I’m afraid I’m one of those who hasn’t embraced the new trend. Pages are littered with “outside of,” “inside of” and—horror of all horrors—“off of.”

And oh yes, those lovely cat drawings throughout the book are actual portraits of Lucius, Lydia, Leo, Linus, L.B., Alvar, Lillie, T.J., Perkins and Miss Tommie.… (más)