Alison Libby is the author of I am so much: keeping myself and all the people I’ve been with alive, Published today from The Dial Press. Below, she discusses how this book was written with her cat, Riz.
Most people think of writing a book, especially a memoir, as a solitary exercise done in isolation and solitude. Most writers don’t get any help while writing, except for an editor. Not me, I’m different. Most of my writing was supervised by my cat Riz.
Riz is what I like to call the “arm rest cat.” He hadn’t been with me long when I started writing the book, and while he’s a good friend, now that the book is complete he’s turned into a mere lap cat.
It’s really a relief. It’s impossible to type on your laptop when most of your lap is occupied by a 17-pound tuxedo cat (I claim in my book to be a lot, and he’s even more so).
But when I started writing, Riz was in a very specific situation physically. Existentially, his position is really that of apartment manager, but physically, in the early days of writing I would sit on the couch with my computer on my lap and my feet on my coffee table.
Riz would climb onto the couch, look into my eyes for 10 seconds, and then turn over and lie down across my legs, making maximum physical contact without getting on top of me. While I was moving around Word documents or working on a sentence, my left hand rested on her big, furry belly as it rose and fell with her sleepy breaths.
After a few weeks, I actually had to go and get a work station because there are so many distractions in my apartment, and Riz is just one of them.
I completed 13 of my essays at a huge desk next to a guy who was loudly eating pistachios, but I always came home and fiddled with my living arm rest, Riz.
