Alison Leiby is the author of I’m a Lot: Surviving Myself and All the People I’ve Been, out today from The Dial Press. Below, she discusses how this book was written alongside her cat, Rizz. (Photo credit: Mindy Tucker)
Most people find writing a book, especially a memoir, to be a solitary exercise done in isolation and solitude. With the exception of an editor, most writers have no help when they are writing. Not me, I’m different. I had most of my writing overseen by my cat, Rizz.
Rizz is what I like to call an “arm rest cat.” I hadn’t had him long when I started writing the book, and while he is a snuggly buddy, he only turned into a lap cat now that the book is completed.
It’s honestly a relief. It is impossible to type on your laptop when most of your lap is occupied by a 17-pound tuxedo cat (I claim in my book that I’m a lot, and he’s even more).
But when I began writing, Rizz had a very specific position he occupied, physically. Existentially, his position is really the manager of the apartment, but physically, I would sit on the couch with my computer on my lap and my feet up on my coffee table in the early days of writing.
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Rizz would hop up on the couch, stare into my eyes for 10 seconds, and then flop over and lie flush with my leg, maximum physical contact without ever being on top of me. While I surfed around Word documents or labored over a sentence, my left arm could rest on his big, fuzzy belly as it rose and fell with his sleepy breathing.
After a few weeks, I had to actually go and get a workspace because the distractions of my apartment are numerous, and Rizz is only one of them.
I completed my 13 essays at a giant desk near a man eating pistachios too loudly, but always came home and kept tinkering away with my living arm rest, Rizz.
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