Pollard Memorial Library (Lowell)

Teaching the cat to sit, a memoir, Michelle Theall

eng

autobiography

no index present

non fiction

Teaching the cat to sit

812258035

Michelle Theall

a memoir

"The book opens with Michelle taking on the priest in her Catholic church in Boulder, Colorado, who is reneging on his promise to baptize her four-year-old son, Logan, a mixed race kid who was in an abusive home with unfit teenage parents before she and her partner of eleven years Avery adopted him. But the real tension at the heart of the book is Michelle wrestling with where she came from, what it means to be Catholic, what her faith means to her in spite of the church's stance on social issues, as well as coping with her own mother's unwillingness to accept her loving relationship with her partner even though she dotes on Logan--and how sometimes you have to meet in the middle to get along with family. For Michelle, it wasn't until she developed MS and was being cared for by Avery--the only conduit her mother had to find out news of her daughter's condition from 2,000 miles away--that her mother began to accept her partner as family. Ultimately, they forged a bond over loving Michelle. Michelle does poignant as well as she does spare and paints a portrait of a mother-daughter relationship that is at once fraught and loving, doomed and hopeful, as she and her mom try to relate across generations and cultures, sexual orientation and illness, faith and religion. At its core, Teaching the Cat to Sit is a mother-daughter story about being a mother when you still need a mother yourself"--, Provided by publisher