When I heard that Kyoko Mori was writing a memoir about cats and birds, I thought that nothing made more perfect sense. She teaches in the MFA Program in creative writing at George Mason University, where I was once her student. Anyone who knows Mori knows her affection for these creatures, and I was excited to see how she would unravel and complicate her fascination with this topic in the same way she did with knitting in her book Yarn or her Japanese upbringing in Polite Lies.
Cat and Bird (Belt Publishing, 2024)details Mori’s experience as a bird rehabilitator, and is structured around the six house cats that defined the major eras of Mori’s life— from Japan to the Midwest, and eventually to Washington D.C., where she currently lives with her two cats Miles and Jackson.
We begin the call over Zoom, and my first question is immediately answered: Are Miles and Jackson participating in this interview? I’m greeted by both Mori and Miles, her kind-of-blue Siamese who waves to the camera with a little help, and I’m assured Jackson is hovering nearby as well. For most of the interview, Miles sits on Mori’s desk, his serene, statuesque face situated just inside the camera frame.
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The Rumpus: Cats and birds come up a lot in both your fiction and nonfiction, and most everyone who knows you also knows about your love for these creatures. Is there are a reason you wanted to write about your cats specifically now?
Kyoko Mori: I was thinking about all the nonfiction books that I’ve written, and I realized that, for some reason, every time I wrote about this period of my life between twenty and forty, when I was living in the Midwest—especially the times when I was living in Green Bay with my ex-husband, Chuck—I somehow portrayed my cat Dorian like he was an interesting side character rather than the main feature of my life. He was always in the periphery of my story with Chuck, and that was just not how it was. He was at the center of my life that I shared with Chuck. I had made Dorian into a kind of interesting character actor, and it was so totally unfair. I did not do justice to that cat.
I needed to write a book in which Dorian really gets his due. I hadn’t done that before because I was always afraid. There were so many books about cats and dogs that are kind of cutesy and sentimental, and I hate it. I didn’t want to write about cats because I didn’t want to be cutesy.
And birds I didn’t write about so much because I felt like I wasn’t much of an expert. I’m not a biologist. I almost backed into nature writing because I didn’t think of myself as a nature-writing kind of a writer, but actually I’ve written a lot about birds by now.
Rumpus: That’s interesting because, especially in those nature writing chapters, I was reminded of some other nature writers like Annie Dillard and Loren Eiseley because, like them, you sort of let the drama and mystery of science play out without a lot of embellishing. Were there any writers in particular you were looking to for inspiration when crafting this book?
Mori: Annie Dillard always—a total inspiration. In Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, she has science, and then she also has things like Old Testament scripture studies, and she goes and observes these animals almost like a citizen scientist would do. But she really actually knows a lot of science, and I think that was a combination I wanted to get.
I wasn’t really a great science student. When I became a bird watcher and a bird rehabilitator, I thought, now that there was a reason to learn about how birds develop. I was totally motivated. It was so interesting because it was all hands on.
Rumpus: What are some of the joys and challenges about returning to some of these familiar themes and subjects that circulate your body of work? For instance, revisiting the time you spent in the Midwest, or your interest in Sei Shonagon.
Mori: I had written an essay about Shonagon a long time ago, and I always wanted to include her in a book. I think of her as a kind of role model, you know. However, after Trump got elected, I decided I shouldn’t be like Sei Shonagon, who lived at the palace as a lady-in-waiting to the empress and never wrote about politics. She observed the birds and the flowers in the palace garden, reported the witty conversations about poetry and culture that the residents of the palace had with one another, and commented on the sumptuous costumes they wore. I live just a few miles from the White House, whereas Shonagon lived at the court she was writing about, so we were similarly situated. I am not cut out for writing about politics either, but unlike Sei Shonagon, I believed I should try to make some useful political commentary. Then, after about two or three years of Trump, I thought I have to invite Sei Shonagon back into my life, and that was so satisfying. I was admitting to myself that it was okay to write about cats and birds and my daily life among friends and neighbors, even in times of political unrest.
We all—well maybe not all—but many writers write about the same things. They revisit their childhood, they revisit their coming-of-age, they revisit how they became a writer. And these were all things that I had included in my books before. But just like how the cats were in the periphery of all those other books, the act of writing itself had been pushed to the side, too, like, “Oh, I’m experiencing all these things . . . and, by the way, I’m a writer.” That wasn’t how I really thought about my life. I wanted this to be a book about coming-of-age as a writer because, in the end, that’s what is most important to me: cats, birds, and writing. As you pointed out, this is a book about obsessions, so writing had to take center stage along with cats and birds.
Rumpus: Similarly, you’ve been a champion of narrative form. What are the joys and challenges of returning to that kind of story construction? At this point, do you feel like you’re a master of it? Or do you feel like you’re still honing your craft when it comes to narrative storytelling.
Mori: One is always trying to do better. I don’t think of myself as an experimental writer. I’m not somebody who’s inspired by form. I know there are a lot of brilliant writers who say, “I want to try this form, or, I’m going to do this different.” That is not where my mind goes. I want to tell a story and reflect on it at the same time. For each story, that’s different, but somewhere in the crossroads, where essay and memoir meet, that is where I really want to work.
This book is a memoir, but it’s also like a collection of essays, and I like the shorter segments where I can really ask, “What is the narrative for the segment? What am I reflecting on?” I’m not just telling a story, you know. I’m contemplating. What does the story even mean to me? That always fascinates me, but it’s hard to reach a balance. How much narrative is important? How much reflection is important?
Rumpus: I think it’s fair to say that this book is about obsession. So when writing about obsession, do you feel like you feel a need to earn the obsession? And I both mean that in terms of credibility, but also, do you feel a need to justify your obsessions as a person?
Mori: I don’t feel that I need to justify it as much as I need to write about it in such a way that I really portray that obsession. But if a part of me is presenting it like it’s a little too much, I understand that. Robert Wilson was so helpful for this, who was my editor for the chapter “Home Bodies,” which appeared in The American Scholar Magazine in a different form.
He said that the one thing that was lacking in my first draft of that essay was the ability to portray my obsession with cats and solitude with the sense that it’s a little much. Like, the narrator should know that what she’s saying is compelling, and yet yes, it’s a little much. In the process of revising the essay, I realized that cultivating a sense of irony is what you have to do for the whole book, especially when you’re writing about your obsession. You don’t have to justify it. You don’t have to earn it. But you have to be able to stand back from it.
Rumpus: Can we talk about the Dorian chapter a little bit? This is the chapter that specifically focuses around maybe the most important cat in your life, and his death. So going into this chapter, I was expecting something that was going to be very heavy with pet grief and pathos. However, I was a little surprised to see that the pathos in the chapter was not really directed toward the loss of a pet but regret about not allowing oneself to be vulnerable. I found that very touching. It’s one of my favorite chapters. I’m wondering what you learned about how to write about pet grief when writing this memoir, especially when writing about Dorian.
Mori: I wanted to do justice to Dorian. He was a tough cat, but he was the cat that, after he died, many of my friends who were probably bit by him couldn’t come up with anything nice about him. “You’ve had him for so long!” “We know he met so much to you!”
Yes, Dorian was everything to me and always will be. But a part of me knows that is a little eccentric and even my friends understood that. I think Dorian really taught me to absolutely love him and take him seriously. But I understand that how it was between us is not how it looked to other people, and I wanted to capture that.
Rumpus: It’s also one of funniest chapters, which was a surprise as well. I mean, it is definitely a sad chapter, but between those delicately worded letters from your friends and the interactions between Dorian and the vet, I did not know I was going to be laughing in that chapter.
Mori: Even with my ex-husband, Chuck, in that chapter—his own stubbornness in not wanting to come with me to the vet, his refusal for an empty ritual—is something I was so irritated by, and yet respected in the end. But this is why we couldn’t be married anymore because we each felt like we had to pursue our own truth, and we didn’t even have to share them. It’s like, “Why don’t you go figure out your own truth, and if you want to talk about it later, that’s great, but it’s not a requirement.” It’s funny and sad at the same time.
Rumpus: In the book, you talk about your experience as the bird rehabilitator and how you’re trained not to lend sentimentality to the birds. As a personal essayist, how does that complicate your ability to write about them?
Mori: Sentimentality in writing is such an interesting question, especially as a teacher. Often my students will not put pressure on what they were writing about or will veer away from where I think the narrative is supposed to go because they don’t want to be sentimental about things. So I’m always telling people that there’s a huge difference between sentiment and sentimentality.
Sentiment is great and necessary: if there’s a tragedy, you feel really sad. Like when my cat Oscar died, I felt like I couldn’t even make myself food. That is sentiment, but sentimentality is when you wallow in that, or you present yourself as this precious person who is a victim of your own emotions. And I don’t want to do that, but that does not mean that you can’t have sentiment.
The bird rehabilitation is a good example of that. It’s about drawing a boundary. The naturalists we worked with at the hatchery wanted to make sure we weren’t going to refuse to let the birds go at the end. They so emphasized that we should be almost clinical about it. But no volunteer was clinical about the birds. It is okay to totally love the birds that you’re working with, because if you’re waking up at dawn to feed a dozen little birds with a little syringe of food, you have to be motivated by love. But you also have to be able to let the birds go at the end.
When entering a narrative that has great emotion, it’s important to commit to capturing the emotion and portraying it. But also knowing when to stop. Knowing when to leave that scene, or knowing you’ve said enough, or maybe toning it down a little bit. But that’s not to say you shouldn’t go there. And I think it’s the same thing working with birds. You should totally commit to what you’re doing but be willing to stop when it’s time to stop.
Rumpus: I think that juxtaposes really, interestingly with the portions of this book about your cats as well. In the book you say that you don’t believe that writing about grief leads to closure. Can you talk a little bit about that?
Mori: Yeah, I don’t think there’s ever closure. I should do some research about when people started to talk about closure so much. I mean, I certainly don’t remember growing up talking about it. I don’t think there’s closure to emotions like grief. You’ll always feel it. And the only reason you’re not feeling it so immediately is that time passed, not because you wrote about it. And the fact that you’re writing about it is probably the result of the fact that some time passed, so it’s not like the writing is the thing that gave you closure. Even then it’s not closure as much as it is gaining the ability to look at it more clearly.
Closure seems to imply that if something similar were to happen again, you wouldn’t be affected in the same way. There are some things in life like that. When I encounter people like my father, who was a terrible father, or my stepmother, who was a totally manipulating person, I feel prepared, like, “Oh, I’ve dealt with this before, and I dealt with it during a time when I had no power. But I’m still here. I can handle this.” That’s not closure as much as having learned a certain pattern in life and coming up with strategies to cope.
But I don’t think that’s true with grief. Grief always feels new. When somebody you love dies, whether it’s a pet or a human being, you wake up to the world every morning without that person. It isn’t going to feel like there is ever going to be closure to that. But your life moves on from that, and you have other things going on in your life aside from that grief. Grief doesn’t go away, but other things enter your life to make grief less central. This is why I believe that if your pet dies, you shouldn’t wait five years to get another pet. You’re going to be feeling bad no matter what, so why not be experiencing something else as well?
And when you write about grief, you almost have to re-enter and recreate the place where you were the most vulnerable. I don’t know why we do it. Really, it’s not like you’re going to feel better about it at the end. The only thing you feel better about is “Wow, I finally wrote something that, in itself, is satisfying.” Because you feel like you told a good story. Or you wrote a good essay. You portrayed this thing and made sense out of it. I don’t think that’s quite the same as closure.
So I think people should write about the things that make them upset, not because they are going to feel any better about the hardship they’d experienced after writing about it, but because that’s the story they have to tell. For some mysterious reason, some of us really like to tell stories. It’s not the same as talking about it. Actually, I don’t like to talk casually in real life about grief or hardship. There are better things to talk about that are more interesting and pleasant. But somehow, I really like putting words together. Grief and hardship provide material that is complex and challenging, so there’s some pleasure in putting our stories and our thoughts all together.
I often say to my friends who are not writers, “You should only be a writer if that’s the thing you really want to do, and you can’t imagine doing anything else.” A lot of the time people will say, “I have a good story to tell, and I really feel like I need to tell it.” Well, like . . . for what? I mean, if you like to tell stories, by all means go ahead. But if you feel like sharing your story is going to be educational to other people, well, there are better ways of educating other people than writing a memoir. And it takes so long! If I wanted to help people, I would have found a more efficient way than to write a memoir.
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Author photograph by Jennifer Packard
