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Hello, everybody.
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This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form, and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Hello, and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Dr. Rebecca Van Leer about her book titled Cat, which is part of Bloomsbury's Object Lesson series. This edition has just been published in 2025 and starts from the premise of the author who we're going to be speaking with, buying a home and moving in with some cats. That could be the premise of many things. And in this case, it involves an exploration of kind of what does it mean to have a house, to have a relationship with humans, with cats, with potential future humans. There's all sorts of kind of thinking involved that begins from a situation that I think many of us have been in or is very relatable in a lot of ways. So I think this will be an interesting discussion. Rebecca, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
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Thank you so much for having me.
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Miranda, could you please start us off by introducing yourself a little bit and tell us why you decided to write a book. Write it for object lessons and write it about a cat.
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Yes. So I am an author and ex academic with a PhD from Brown. My prior book, how to Adjust to the Dark, was a novella that is a hybrid between poetry and Prose. And as I was starting to embark on the project of a second book, I had many swirling ideas. I was working on, at one point, a horror novel, a novel about friendship. But I kept coming back to a little bit of writing that I was doing on the side about my cats, which at first I was calling fiction, and working on a short story about. And as that project evolved and I got further into the manuscript, I wanted to investigate questions of how cats serve as a kind of intermediary in the relationship between myself and my partner, Dr. Steven Swarbrick, who writes on psychoanalysis and environmentalism. So our cats are very much at the heart of our relationship and are a way that we express our feelings towards each other, not just toward the cats. So that investigation eventually needed to take the form of nonfiction, to really get into the personal, to talk about his scholarship and my thinking. And I also knew about the Audray Glasson series from Bloomsbury, which invites all kinds of hybrid writing by academics and quasi academics. So once I knew that it was going there, that helped me shape the material even further.
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Yeah, that definitely makes sense. Kind of combining so many different ideas. And as you said, it is sort of a hybrid, unique platform. And that enables a lot of really interesting exploration. But it is this kind of idea of cats being really central to relationships that I think we want to discuss first. Because it's something that comes up all the time.
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Right.
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Are you a dog person? Are you a cat person? So I was not surprised to find something you discuss in your book. How do you approach these kinds of questions? Obviously, the differences between cats and dogs, but also the way people talk about those differences and kind of shape identities around them.
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Yes, it's almost like a more affiliative version of astrology. People want to have ways to make themselves known to others. And being a cat person or a dog person can convey, on the one hand, that you're a cat person, you're an indoor creature, you value independence and autonomy, or you're a dog person, you're more extroverted, you value sociality. And that's a very simple binary. Of course, many people also have both cats and dogs, or love both cats and dogs. But I think that these two creatures are often pitted against each other for the simple reason that they are the two most common domestic species that we live with. And the way that we structure our lives around them is usually very different because of their innate differences.
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C
That's definitely a good case for why those two kind of come up as comparisons at various points. So then if we're thinking about the specifics of living with cats, what was it like to move house with cats?
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It is challenging. This is something that I'm sure that many people have experienced. If you have a dog, they're somewhat trained. You might have even trained them specifically to tolerate what happens in a car in terms of the disruptions and distractions. Some dogs just like it as well. I have never heard of a cat who likes being in a car. Cats like to be where they are familiar to the surroundings. And cars are absolutely not that they are moving. Their jostling, strange noise are coming from around them. So I've moved with cats at this point. I've made two large cross country moves as well as one smaller move. And the smaller move is the one that's actually detailed in the book. At the time when my partner and I had finished graduate school and were moving from Providence, Rhode island to New Orleans, we had three cats of whom could not tolerate being in a carrier. That's a two day drive. So there was a lot of vomiting, there was a lot of excrement, there was a lot of panting, a lot of cats needing to kind of switch positions. The cat who didn't like the carrier was often in my lap. But then my cat Gus got overheated and needed to sit in my lap. So it becomes a very stressful process that makes you wonder why you would ever move at all if it means subjecting your cat hats to this and thereby yourself to this. And that's one of the things that I'm reckoning with at the beginning of the book, as you said, what it means to move, to try to create a new context and a better or different life. And whether that's ever really possible.
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Yeah, that's definitely a very tricky challenge indeed. If we're thinking then about kind of the purpose of having cats more broadly, why do you think humans have cats? Are they ways of making people happy? How does that happen?
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It's very interesting. I talk about this a bit in the book, but cats are different from other domestic creatures insofar as they don't have a clear use value. So we often think of cats as being domesticated because of their ability to hunt pests. But many studies show that cats aren't actually good at controlling a rodent population in particular, and that many cultures who began to invite cats into their lives already had trained rodent hunters. For example, ancient Romans had ferrets, and that we also trained terriers to hunt rats. Because the cats that were already in Western Europe were not very good at it and dogs were better suited to the task. So it does beg the question, what are cats for? And definitely the biology shows that the response that we have when looking into a cat's face with its wide eyes is similar to looking at an infant, that there's just a, you know, cuteness that is biologically appealing to the human being. And I tend to think that we keep them in our life because of that cuteness, but also because of the trouble that they cause us, that there's something pleasurable about the way that they disrupt our expectations and our routines and assert their independence with that cuteness. And that really, they teach us how to love without discipline, without expectation, and that for. For those who call themselves cat people, that that is the enjoyment.
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C
Another thing that clearly cats bring into your life are questions about kind of work and labor. And obviously, if cats are creating enjoyment, if humans were creating enjoyment, we would call that a form of labour. Right? So if cats are creating enjoyment, are they working? Do cats work?
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I think that's a very interesting question. We could say that cats are doing a kind of emotional labor, certainly. My cat Milton is constantly working to get what he wants in a certain way and seems to know that displays of cuteness like flopping over on the table and cuddling are a means to an end. So insofar as the cat may have strategies of performing that enable them to get what they want, I do think that that's a kind of work. But it's interesting because plenty of people have cats who are supremely unfriendly, who are bitey, who. Or spicy is another term that people like to use. And they still, I think, completely deserve the same things from their human beings in terms of care, even though they might be less willing to engage in that labor. So we might say that cats can opt to work as a way to enhance their experience within the domestic settings where they always find them. Or not always, but often by themselves.
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What about how cats make you think about your work and jobs? That was a really interesting aspect of the book.
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I thought so, yes. There's a long history of cats being used as figures for resistance, which Dr. Lee Claire Le Berg explores in more depth in her book Marks for Cats. And I do think that what I've just said about how some cats defy our desires to have them express cuteness and still kind of get what they want out of us is a kind of resistance. But even my cat Milton, who is willing to cuddle and purr and do all of the things that one would want in a cat. For me, he's still an anti work figure. The cat writ large is simply because of this history. Where they're role in human culture writ large is certainly not to perform any task and also because they don't do what you want them to typically. So I think that that independence and also their ability to do nothing, the 90% of the time that they spend idle, both are kind of a little aspirational for me as a worker to do less, to resist when appropriate, and to know that simply being can sometimes be enough.
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C
That can definitely be hard to remember sometimes. So I'm sure cats that kind of, as you said earlier, are disrupting your routines might sometimes be helpful in that sort of sense. But I realise we've been talking about kind of cats in general, which is of course useful to a degree, but you also, in the book have some very specific cats that you discuss too, so. So how does one choose a cat?
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I think that there are two ways to choose a cat. I have had the opportunity to adopt all of the cats in the book, except for Toby, who came with my partner Stephen. But Gus and Milton are both cats who I met at animal shelters where I saw dozens and dozens and dozens of cats. And I was waiting, first of all for the feeling that this cat might be, for me, just something intuitive. But beyond that, I also think that it's really helpful to talk to the people who staff these facilities, or if you're communicating with an Instagram account or a foster person on Pet Finder or a similar website, to just ask questions about the cat in terms of their energy level and also their relationship to other cats, whether they tend to be dominating or more passive. So that if you're bringing them into a home with other creatures, creatures, you can make sure that their temperament seems to be something that will fit in amicably. So, you know, a combination of intuition and research, I think is a wonderful way, if you have a selection, to pick out one particular cat. But I also think that if a cat comes into your life, if there is a cat in your backyard who seems to need to be taken in, or if you open yourself to the idea of having a cat and someone tells you, oh, hey, I know this cat, I know this cat who's being given away, I know this cat who lives in someone's backyard, I know someone whose cat just had kittens, that taking the cat that the universe gives you is also a lovely and wonderful way to find an animal companion and also to help deal with the growing Reality that there are more frail cats than we really know. Kind of what to do with as a culture as a whole.
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C
So there's therefore many ways then that one could end up with a cat. Let's assume that that's happened. Someone's taken, you know, one of these paths you've just laid out for us. Well, how might we then think of the people involved? Are these cat owners? Are they cat parents?
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I do not like the term pet parents. It's something that Donna Haraway talks about in the Companion Species Manifesto, specifically in reference to dogs. As the equation between pets and children being fundamentally destructive to both pets and children, simply because it sets pets up to be beings from whom we expect unconditional love, which is not fair, given the interspecies relationship that we're in, to believe that we're owed that. Of course, our children may not also owe us that, but that's a separate question. But conversely, to equate pets with children as being destructive to children insofar as pets are beings that we need to control to a certain extent so that they can live freely, whereas so many models of parenthood are moving away from discipline and control that has been destructive to children in the past. So that's Donna Haraway on dogs as not children. As for me, I think that cats, you know, even Less than dogs are beings who we can expect to exist within a family unit in predictable ways. So they're so independent by nature and may really not give us the things that we want. I've already said that that frustration can be a source of pleasure, and maybe it can with children, too. But I think that to respect the cat's autonomy, that really what we are, we are cat custodians, cat companions. And I think of my cats a little bit more as just friends who I live with and whose needs I have to attend to.
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That's definitely interesting, given how much I think pet parent discourse dominates today. I think the other link then around kind of, or the other big topic of conversation is, is pet parenting a thing? Fine, we've discussed that. The other one is kind of one gets a pet in order to practice having children, or one gets a pet to then have children as a next step. What do you think of that sort of argument?
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There is this idea and a discourse that you learn to care through progressive steps. And people say things like, oh, I can't even keep a plant alive. How could I keep a person alive? But a plant, a cat and a person, I don't see them on a progressive scale of care. They're all very different. Some plants need to be neglected in order to thrive. That is not the case with children or cats, for example. Likewise, the kind of relationship that you have with a pet, I don't think it's predictive of your ability to care for another person. There's a biological bond that you have with a person who you've given birth to that you don't have with a pet. It's a choice to have a pet. And so I think it's just fundamentally different in terms of the hormonal experience, in terms of the emotional experience, in terms of the intellectual experience. And I actually talked yesterday to Chris Baker, who's the author of a children's book about mushrooms, who's saying that for years she had thought of her cat as her baby. But then when she had a baby, she was very surprised to physically kind of recoil from her cat in the immediate days afterward and realize that her cat is not a baby. Her cat is an adult creature who does not need her care. Very interestingly, she said that six years later, it had kind of come back around and her cat was her baby again. But she realized that that was what she wanted of the cat, not what the cat needed from her. So that might be another way to think about it, is that, you know, our pets don't exactly need us in the same way. Their formation, their psychological development of it does not always depend on us, especially if they come into our lives as fully formed beings, as adult creatures who eat adopt. Which is not to say the way that we treat them doesn't impact them. But the level of dependence, I think is just completely different. And you can have a child without ever having had pets, and you can have many pets and not be prepared to have a child. So all forms of care are beautiful, but each one is also unique, not some sort of progressive pathway.
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Yeah, that definitely makes sense, given how context specific kind of everyone's lives are and everyone's responsibilities and abilities and interests and all those sorts of things are. That kind of saying everyone must be on the same path doesn't really work. As soon as you start to kind of poke at that idea, I wonder if we can move then to a different sort of discourse, maybe a less prevalent one. But I found a very intriguing one. So I'm going to use my dictatorial powers as the interviewer to ask you to tell me about what you think might happen if cats ruled the world.
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Yes, this is a very fun one. Originally in the book, I had written a little bit on a Neil Gaiman short and I decided not to do that, given his history. But I do think that there are some fantasies of cats ruling the world, including my personal fantasies that when you live in close proximity to these creatures who seem really soft, who seem to be able to enjoy a life without work, and who just seem to be capable of enjoyment, that it's tempting to wonder what a world would be like if it was molded in their image or for their pleasure. So I delved pretty far into that fantasy and decided that it would actually be quite bad. So, as we know, humans have had a tendency to take over the natural environment and decimate the ecosystems that we live in. Well, and all ecosystems. And in the Anthropocene, we can trace so much species decline not just to human driven climate change, but also to the use of pesticides that is causing the insect to die off. So, you know, we haven't done a great job, but what would cats do? Cats are obligate carnivores. They're predators. And they don't just hunt what they need, they also hunt for pleasure, for fun, essentially. So in our footsteps, they have become secondary drivers of species decline. And if they were fully in charge as the kind of not antisocial but quasi social beings that they are, I don't think that we could expect better Models of community care that would extend to care for the environment writ large. So if cats ruled the world, I think we'd be perhaps in much the same situation that we already are in.
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C
That's certainly an interesting thought experiment. Thank you for taking us through that Thinking then, of sort of inspirations for thinking things through. One thing I always like to ask Object Lessons authors is, of course, about the physicality of the book. Because it's such a distinctive visual series. The books are all quite small. They're always black, and they always have a version of the object that is being discussed on the COVID Now, therefore, obviously your book has a cat on the COVID Is it a specific cat?
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This is a version of my cat, Gus, who is one of the stars of the book. In reality, Gus has one blue eye and one green eye. But another distinctive feature of the Object Lessons colors is that they are black and white with one highlight cover color. So you can't actually have a blue eye and a green eye. You can only have shades of blue or shades of green. So we got as close as we could to Gus with that, two different shades of green eyes. And I'm very pleased to have a version of him out there and in.
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C
People'S hands that is interesting. Always interesting to know about. There's always a story I found behind the design of these covers. So thank you for giving us that little detail there. Is there anything else that we haven't discussed from the book that you want to make sure we include, or anything you found especially surprising in going through this process and coming out with the book?
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Going through the process, in coming out with the book has definitely been interesting. I wanted to convey my deep love for my cats, and I also wanted to convey some of the concerns that I have about the ethics of what we might call pet ownership very broadly. And to do that, I looked at ambivalence in my life and my personal history with cats, as well as in other memoirs. So that does result in some violence coming up throughout the book. So as it's been received, it's been nice to have it often received, kind of as I was hoping that it would be, as a serious investigation of what it means to live with cats. But I've also been surprised at how many people are a bit taken aback by the representations of violence that I've either heard of, secondhand witnessed, or am writing about in other pec memoirs. It's striking to me that people are so uncomfortable with these little moments of violence, given how much of our lives and world exists because of, of violence against animals at the scale of indifference, but also mass agriculture. So, you know, as always, it's interesting to see how it's received and how other people's sensitivities are different from my own. And I hope that those moments of violence don't off put the readers who will get the things that I'm really trying to deliver from the text.
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C
I think there's really quite a lot in there for people to grapple with and think about. But while they are of course doing that, what might you be working on? Any projects you want to give a brief sneak preview of whether or not they're books, whether or not they're about.
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Cats, I am returning to a manuscript that I was working on concurrently with Cat. As I think I mentioned, there was a period where I was working on a horror novel, which actually a paragraph from the original version just appears wholesale in Cat, where I talk about a period when our basement was infested with rats that our cats had absolutely no interest in helping us deal with. Although Toby, our cat at the time, liked to just kind of listen to them. So after abandoning that previous version of the novel, I'm returning to it a little bit, and it dovetails with some of the themes I'm interested in at this point. I've moved away from Rat, and I'm thinking of it more as a fungal horror novel about work and the ways that it seeps into every aspect of our lives. So in that way, it's a continuation of Cat, of some writing that I did at the same time, and of just my larger interest in work in the 21st century. So we'll see. That may be next. Although projects, as they emerge and disappear in my life, it's always surprising which ones come to the forefront and then which ones ultimately get published quickly.
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Yes, that is, I think, the case for many of us, but always interesting to hear a little bit about what might be on the horizon. So best of luck with those projects. And of course, while you are off pursuing them, listeners can read the book Cat from Bloomsbury, part of the Object Lesson series published in 2025. Rebecca, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
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Thank you so much, Miranda.