Reviews

Newsday, February 19, 2001

STACY HORN MAKES me feel like I don't love my cats nearly enough. While she wrestles with her mid-life crisis, obsesses about death and aging, and worries about being single for the rest of her life, she loves her two cats more than anyone I've ever known. They are both diabetic, requiring insulin shots every 12 hours, and one has to get a subcutaneous drip every other day for his failing liver. She imagines their deaths, chronicles their habits and spends an inordinate amount of time lying with them on the couch (when she isn't shuttling them to the vet almost every week). Since reading her memoir "Waiting for My Cats to Die," I have made a concerted effort to spend more time with my own cats, a new leaf that has been met with general indifference around my house.

Horn is the founder and host of the New York online community and Internet service provider Echo, and if you aren't on Echo and don't know someone who is, then you at least know someone who knows someone who is. I promise. Which is why it shouldn't have surprised me when I turned to page 277 and found a six- page interview with my grandmother in California.

So here is my disclaimer: My mother runs the history conference on Echo, and my 84-year-old grandmother is the Inspirational Old Person in this book who lives in the present, writes letters to the editor, gets arrested for civil disobedience and still has a great bod. I identify more with Horn and her couch than with my tireless Gram, and since I had been enjoying the book before I was aware of the extent of my personal connection to it, I feel I can review it with a clear conscience.

Stacy Horn is in her early 40s, lives alone with her cats, has a failing business and suffers regular panic attacks. "I don't know how I got here," she writes. She owns a book of transcriptions of in-flight recordings from plane crashes and seems to be setting out to write her own chronicle of spiraling descent. In her introduction she writes, "My pain will be your amusement." Reading these mid-life memoirs is like listening to one of your funniest and most neurotic friends bemoan the state of her life: You love her, but she can get annoying after a while, as when she complains that even "people in prison get married. There must be something wrong with me." But she can also be wise: "Nostalgia is both a self-inflicted wound and the morphine you take for the pain." Horn writes in short chapters and short sentences that come at a breakneck speed. The staccato, rat-a-tat-tat rhythms of her prose recall drumming, something she does every Saturday night with the Manhattan Samba Group. She also sings in a choir and wonders about the best way to survive an oncoming subway car.

By the time you finish her book, you feel that you have gotten to know the character that is Stacy Horn. She understands important things like just what a great show "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" is and just how sexy Ruben Blades can be.

She fantasizes about making a retirement home for herself and her friends on Coney Island, worries about the unhappy ghost in her apartment and tends the graves at forgotten cemeteries.

The author develops a "dead-people support system" of ordinary dead women with some connection to her life and researches what she can about them. She sifts through artifacts and documents in basements and archives to reclaim the details of others' lives and stop their "being lost forever [in order] to diminish the power of death and to make me remember to live." What is so appealing about Horn is the way she gets interested in something and veers off to learn about it. She frets over the boxes of unclaimed ashes that lie in funeral homes and befriends a sweet mortician in the process of looking into the problem. She is drawn to veterans and ends up singing with them after a parade. I won't spoil her transcendent moment with the construction workers, but it is worth the price of admission.

"This is New York," she writes. "We're miserable and cranky and proud of it." She later relates that "New York, happily, has one of the lowest suicide rates in the country." The former is undoubtedly responsible for the latter.

Horn's hilarious griping not only eases the pain, it heals the wound.