Synopses & Reviews
You've passed forty. You're single, deeply addicted to watching television, and obsessed by the past. Your business seems to be failing. You're hopelessly devoted to two diabetic cats, whose dietary and medical regimens dictate your schedule. Not only are you informed your apartment is haunted, you're actually starting to believe it may be true. This is a life?
Waiting for My Cats to Die is Stacy Horn's heartbreakingly honest and achingly funny reply to her own question. Here is a memoir that goes straight to the indignities and preoccupations of midlife: what happens the moment we realize that life has a distinctly downward pull to it, and that death is more than simply some theoretical possibility.
Stacy decides dying is not something she's going to take lying down. Having polled subscribers on echonyc.com, the online service she founded, for advice, she concludes that the best strategy in the battle against aging is a frontal assault. We're all going to end up in graveyards? Fine. Let's make them as homey and welcoming as we can. She clears away underbrush from abandoned cemeteries, wipes cobwebs from forgotten crypts, looks for gems amid the clutter of storage rooms and basements, tracks down precious records of long-dead relatives, interviews the elderly for the wisdom of their age, and pores over local archives, seeking the identity of her ghostly roommate (and hoping to learn why it seems to have nothing better to do than hang around a small one-bedroom apartment in the West Village of Manhattan).
As this wonderful, courageous, and irresistible memoir shows, acting out can be both survival strategy and affirmation. There's no avoiding the day when the credits will roll on your life, so accumulate as many credits as you can (that way, they'll take longer to unroll). Stacy seizes her days with fierce passion: she learns to drum, sings with a choir, writes treatments for TV shows, somehow manages to keep her business on an even keel, and freely embraces all the fantasies and denials that sustain every one of us. And those poor afflicted cats? Their furry, stubborn will to live provides reason enough to celebrate. Waiting for My Cats to Die will make you weep, laugh, commiserate, and fall back in love with life.
Review
"[A] remarkably candid account of one woman's acceptance of aging, piqued with heartening moments of exhilaration." Publishers Weekly
Review
"For someone who can't stop talking about death, Horn makes a strong and lovely statement about the joy of life." Booklist
Synopsis
When Stacy Horn--single, deeply addicted to television, and hopelessly attached to two diabetic cats--turned forty, she free-falled into a mid-life crisis.
Waiting for My Cats to Die is a passionately and profoundly honest look at what happens the moment you realize--beyond a shadow of a doubt--that some day the credits will roll on your life. There are all those things you haven't done yet. There are all those things you have and wish you hadn't. In the battle against time, a frontal attack is the best strategy. Horn explores abandoned cemeteries and descends into crypts. She researches long-lost relatives, interviews the elderly, and learns all she can about the ghost haunting her apartment. No sign indicating the downward pull of things goes unnoticed. And yet life, with so much to celebrate, is irresistible. Here is a wonderful, quirky, refreshing memoir of hilarity and heartache: life at the mid-point of life.
About the Author
Stacy Horn is the founder of the Echo NY website, a New York-based online community, and author of Cyberville.