Homer: The Ninth Life Of A Blind Wonder Cat

“Cat Lovers Don’t Read Books”

There is no accounting for luck; Zeus gives prosperity to

rich and poor just as he chooses, so you must take what

he has seen fit to send you and make the best of it.

-HOMER, The Odyssey

FAMOUS CATS WEREN’T A THING LIKE THEY ARE TODAY, back when I first began writing the proposal and outline for Homer’s Odyssey in 2007. There were no cat cafes. Cat videos hadn’t yet taken over the internet. The “Friskies 50” list of the internet’s fifty most influential cats was years away not only from execution, but from any relevance. Everybody knew about famous animated cats, like Felix, Tom, Sylvester, the Aristocats, and the perennial Hello Kitty. I remembered a movie from childhood called That Darn Cat! There were celebrity cats like Morris and the elegant Fancy Feast Persian, although they were “played” by a succession of different cats, more brand icons than actual felines. A fictional kitty named Sneaky Pie Brown starred in a series of cozy mystery novels. But there didn’t seem to be any real-life famous cats, cats who were also members of real-life human families.

There was, however, a cat I’d read about in a recent newspaper article—a cat who’d lived in a library in small-town Iowa, and whose human caregiver had just sold a proposal for a book about his life for more than a million dollars.

My own first book, a novel about South Beach, had been published a few months earlier. Now I was trying to figure out a second book. I didn’t think I could earn anything close to a million dollars for any book idea I might have, but I remember putting down the newspaper and looking across the living room at Homer—who was, at the time, visible only from the waist down, the upper half of his body buried under the sofa as he struggled to retrieve an intriguing new belled toy that had rolled away from him—and thinking, I’ll bet I could write a book about Homer. Homer’s a pretty cool cat…

Once I had the idea, I couldn’t shake it loose—as if it had always been waiting there for me to unearth. Over the next few weeks, I started jotting down notes and writing out some preliminary paragraphs. I was still working full-time in an office, so I wrote in the pre-dawn hours of early morning—hours when Homer himself was the most active, sparking ideas and connections to half-forgotten memories of our earliest life together. Mornings were when Homer was likeliest to decide to use the toilet instead of the litter-box, to chase his big sisters down the hall (Wait up, you guys!), or to disrupt my writing with a preemptory head-bonk as he sat down smack in the middle of the computer keyboard, leaving me to wonder for the millionth time how a blind cat—just like any “normal” cat—infallibly knew when I was looking at a book or a newspaper or a computer screen, at anything rather than at him, and made up his mind to put an immediate end to that.

At the end of two months, I had enough written down to show my L.A.-based literary agent. He was decidedly underwhelmed by the whole thing. Those who’ve read the Afterword to the paperback edition of Homer’s Odyssey may recall that his initial response was, “But why would anybody want to read this?”

“Because a lot of people like cats?” I’d been so flummoxed by his question that I heard myself phrasing my answer—a statement I knew for a fact to be true—as if it, too, were a question, the answer to which I was unsure of. “Because Homer is blind and interesting and has an inspirational life story?”

My agent was blunt. “The writing is there, but I don’t think it’s a good idea. I wouldn’t be able to take it to editors.”

I didn’t just pay my agent to make deals for me—I also paid him for his career advice. He knew the publishing industry better than I did, and choosing to move forward with my blind-cat book against that advice was easier said than done.

I took to Google, trying to get a sense of how many others like me there might be out there—people who were also living with blind and “special-needs” cats. I ended up calling a woman named Alana Miller, who ran an organization called Blind Cat Rescue in North Carolina. We talked for a while about the plight of blind cats, the barriers they faced in finding adoptive homes, the way so many were summarily euthanized in open-intake shelters. We agreed—perhaps idealistically, but with utter sincerity—that if a book like this could save even one of them, it would be worth the effort of having written it.

I’d already been working with the notion of blind leaps of faith as being one of the central themes of this embryo book, and I decided to take one now. Thank you so much for everything you’ve done for me, and for being the first person to have confidence in me as a writer, I wrote to my agent a few days later. But we see my proposed HOMER’S ODYSSEY project so very differently that I believe it’s in our mutual best interests to part ways.

I didn’t know many other writers who could refer me to their agents, so I went back to what I had done to find my first one—sending blind query letters and emails “over the transom” (meaning without a referral from another client). But this time I didn’t have to wait close to a year to hear back, as I had with the first book. Within only a few weeks, a senior agent with a prestigious New York literary agency pronounced herself intrigued by both the writing and the story as I’d outlined it, despite being a self-professed “dog person.” My confidence was bolstered by this—that I wasn’t just getting the, Awwwwww…Homer’s a cute kitty! endorsement—and also by how quickly I’d found an agent this time. Surely, I told myself, this could only auger good things. The two of us spent the next four or five months working together closely on an outline, a full proposal, and two sample chapters. We went back and forth over whether those sample chapters should simply be the first two chapters—or perhaps the story of Homer chasing off the burglar? Passages about Homer catching flies in mid-air? Homer and his Kleenex guitar? Final decisions were eventually made, and it was just after Memorial Day of 2008 when we decided we were ready to share Homer’s Odyssey—at least in its broad strokes—with others.

It may have taken months to pull the proposal together, but it took only a few weeks for the rejections to start coming in from publishers. The writing is wonderful, and I’d love to see more from this author, the typical rejection would begin. But in a crowded pet-memoir marketplace, I just don’t feel that Homer is interesting enough to stand out.

“Crowded marketplace?!” I’d exclaim to my agent. The only other cat memoir at the time was the one about Dewey, the Iowa library cat, and that hadn’t even come out yet.

Ironically, Homer would usually be doing something that I thought was very interesting—or, at a minimum, entertaining—whenever one of these letters would come in. I remember that when I got the first one, Homer had just “liberated” a bag full of catnip toys I’d recently stocked up on. I’d double-wrapped the toys in two plastic bags, hidden those bags inside a duffle bag, and secreted the whole thing underneath a mound of clothes in the bottom of the closet, so that I could distribute them one at a time as the old ones wore out, without the cats’ pestering me to death. But

Homer’s unerring nose had found them anyway. He’d burrowed assiduously into that mound of clothes intended for the laundry—kicking dirty socks and underwear into a heedless pile on the floor behind him—unzipped the duffel bag with his teeth and claws, and torn through the first plastic bag. Looking for all the world like Santa Claus (Santa Claws?), Homer now pranced down the hall and into the living room with the sack of toys between his teeth, the other two cats for once following him eagerly as they waited for him to distribute the booty.

“Not interesting enough?!” Poor Laurence, then my husband-to-be, was generally the only receptacle for my indignation, which waxed hot when I’d receive one of these letters. “The cat has no eyes! Does he need to have no eyes and also learn how to juggle?” I’d demand. “Would that make them happy? Maybe if Homer had no eyes and could ask for his food in perfect sign language like Koko the gorilla.”

That Homer wasn’t “interesting” enough (or some variation of that) was what my agent and I heard most frequently. Also that animal lovers only wanted to read books about dogs and horses; that animal lovers didn’t want to read animal books at all in “our current tech-centric environment;” that animal lovers were only receptive to picture books. One editor informed us matter-of-factly that “cat lovers don’t read books.” Why do you think there aren’t more cat books? he asked with perfect Catch-22 logic. Another said that, sure, maybe cat lovers read books, but they didn’t read memoirs. A third was confident that while cat lovers might read books—and while some of those books might even be memoirs—they definitely didn’t read cat memoirs. (I wish I could say I was making this stuff up.)

By now, I had lost my job as a marketing executive at a magazine company, which had been acquired by another magazine company and then dissolved. The crux of my job had been the analysis of market research on our readers’ consumer-spending habits. The “Marketing Analysis” section I’d written for the Homer’s Odyssey proposal had been exhaustive. I’d provided data on the percentage of cat-owning U.S. households (roughly one third—or, expressed another way, around one hundred million Americans living with at least one cat); the amount of money spent per year by those households on cat-related products and services; and, specifically, the higher-than-average propensity of a wide swath of the U.S. cat-owning population to spend their disposable income on entertainment-related purchases, including dinners out, movie tickets, and books.

“If there’s any hard data out there,” I’d say to Laurence, “supporting the thesis that ‘cat lovers don’t read books,’ I’d be pretty darn interested in seeing it.” (I’m afraid I generally used a saltier word than darn. Forgive me. Those were dark days.)

At this point, our wedding was only a couple of months off, and I was starting to panic. It’s all well and good to get married for richer or poorer, but it still feels awful to enter your marriage without a job or prospects or any viable means of earning an income. Homer was recovering from a recent health scare, the treatment of which had not only eaten into my finances, but had taken its emotional toll on us both. As much as I tried rationally to dismiss the idea, I had the persistent feeling that Homer had gotten sick because I wanted to write about him—that my hubris in thinking ours a story worth sharing publicly had been met by the powers that be with a not-so-gentle rebuke. I was supposed to cherish Homer as he was, the private heart of our own home, and be grateful for that.

It was when things seemed bleakest that I got an electrifying phone call from my agent. A large publishing imprint—one of the biggest and most venerable in the industry—was interested in Homer’s Odyssey. Not only were they interested, they wanted to meet with me in person—along with my agent, a couple of senior editors, the group publisher, and various vice presidents in publicity and marketing. Then my agent said the words that every author dreams of hearing: “They’re talking about a six-figure advance.”

Six figures! Between my unemployed status and upcoming wedding, money was tight. Still, in the week I had before that meeting, I went out and bought a new outfit. I got my hair professionally blown out at a fancy SoHo salon. I invested in a forty-dollar manicure and sixty-dollar pedicure at a high-end spa in the Meatpacking District, rather than relying on the eight-dollar manicures I usually got from an elderly Chinese woman in our apartment building. (I was convinced that senior-level publishing muckety-mucks would be able to tell the difference.) I spent an hour carefully applying my makeup, so it would look like I wasn’t wearing any. I even sprang for a hired car service to take me to the meeting, afraid of relying on the vagaries of afternoon cab availability to get me there on time.

I was already in the car and on my way uptown when I got the call from my agent. Everything had been cancelled. The group publisher (the big boss, basically) hadn’t known what the book was about until shortly before the meeting was supposed to begin. She’d never heard of anything as “creepy” as a cat without eyes, and she was appalled that anyone on her team had considered acquiring Homer’s Odyssey. There was a rumor afloat that she’d gone so far as demoting the senior editor who’d first read the proposal and recommended it for acquisition—as an example to others never to let anything this awful cross her desk again.

“Homer’s Odyssey now has an official body count,” I told Laurence grimly that night, when he got home from work and asked how my meeting had gone.

I’m not sure which hurt worse—the brutality of that last-minute cancellation, after a week of raised hopes and what now seemed like a pathetic level of over-preparation. Or hearing poor Homer, tiny Homer who’d never done a mean thing to anyone in his life, described as “creepy.”

And whose fault is that? I asked myself. Who had subjected Homer to the mockery and derision of ignorant strangers?

I had. I had done it. And even though I knew Homer had no idea that anything unkind had been said about him—or even that such a thing as unkind words existed—those words had opened a wound right in my heart. It hadn’t taken much to revive fears I’d had years ago—the sense that it was my job to safeguard Homer in the disability I’d long-since stopped thinking of that way, to protect him against people who wouldn’t understand him, or who would say ugly things merely because he was different.

Homer didn’t know why he, along with Scarlett and Vashti, unexpectedly found tuna mixed in with their dinner that night. He didn’t know why I cuddled him closer on the couch before going to bed. He merely purred with contentment, nuzzling his head into the crook of my neck as he drifted off to sleep.

Technically, this hadn’t been the final word. There were still a few more editors we hadn’t heard back from. It was possible that one of them might decide to give Homer’s Odyssey a shot.

But I knew I was finished with the whole business. It was one thing to take a blind leap of faith. It was quite another to bang your head—your own and the heads of the ones you loved—repeatedly against the same brick wall, with nothing to show for it but lumps. As soon as I returned from my honeymoon, I vowed, I would send out résumés and look for a proper job.

I got married two weeks later, and drifted through my wedding day as serene as if everything had already been settled. As far as I was concerned, it had.

LAURENCE AND I were married on September 13, 2008, and left for our honeymoon the next evening. And while we spent the following week lolling on Bahamian beaches, enjoying those first few days of married life, the world fell apart.

We returned to find that what would eventually be called the Great Recession had kicked off in our absence. The job I’d been sure I would land, once I devoted my time to looking, now seemed a dubious proposition at best. Nobody was hiring.

So, when I got an email from my agent a week after our return, I saw things in a much different light than I had right before the wedding. An editor named Caitlin Alexander at Delacorte, a Random House imprint, wanted to acquire Homer’s Odyssey. After a few days of back-and-forth with my agent over numbers, they made us an offer—not the million-plus dollars the book about Dewey had sold for, but enough to cover my rent and, if I was thrifty, basic living expenses for a year. Even better than the money was Caitlin herself—kind and cat-loving but also sharp, with ideas for improving my outline that were so insightful, I was excited at the prospect of working with her.

It was Homer who gave Caitlin the final seal of approval, the night she came to our apartment for dinner. “So this is Homer,” she said, when Homer made his usual appearance at the front door to greet the new person. There was a kind of reverence in the way she said his name, a tone that previously Homer had only been used to hearing in my voice, and he responded to it immediately. Caitlin crouched down and placed one of her hands beneath his nose for him to sniff. But Homer was far more interested in the cat treats she’d brought and now held in the other. One paw reached up delicately to swipe them onto the floor, where he greedily gobbled them up. Once all the treats had been dispatched, Homer placed both front paws on Caitlin’s knee, so he could raise himself up and sniff her more thoroughly—obviously hoping for more treats. Caitlin was enraptured, answering Laurence and me in an absent-minded way when we spoke, wholly preoccupied with watching Homer.

“Would you like a glass of wine, Caitlin?” I asked.

“Hmmm…?” Caitlin was scratching Homer beneath his chin, fascinated with watching the muscles around the place where his eyes would have been relax in pleasure. “Sure, that sounds good.”

“Red or white?”

Homer had now flopped onto the floor and rolled halfway onto his back, delighted with the attention as Caitlin continued to stroke his chin and neck. “Oh…whichever. Hey, look how well he gets around!” she exclaimed, as Homer—deciding he’d received enough pettings for now, and realizing that no further treats were immediately forthcoming—walked off to find something more entertaining to do. “Look how he knows exactly where his toys are! And he doesn’t bump into anything!”

Scarlett and Vashti observed all this from the sidelines with a kind of harrumph-y disdain. What’s so interesting? they seemed to be asking themselves. It’s just Homer, for crying out loud. We manage not to bump into things all the time.

Although we didn’t know it at the time, this would become a sort of template for the way many encounters would play out in our home over the next year.

The paperwork for Homer’s Odyssey was finalized in late October of 2008, and the book was scheduled for publication in late August of 2009. It seemed a long way off. But to make that publication date, I would have to write the entire book by the end of January. I buckled down, and by working fifteen-hour days I managed to have my complete first draft written and submitted by Monday, February 2.

Homer would have his first professional photo shoot later that same day.

By then, the book about Dewey the Library Cat had finally “pubbed,” and it had been a big hit. Suddenly, the conventional wisdom on whether or not there was a market for cat memoirs had shifted. Between that and the success of Marley and Me, pet memoirs were the hot new thing. And what had begun as the small passion project of one cat-loving editor had now become worthy of the full weight of Delacorte’s serious attention.

I had taken numerous photos of Homer when I’d first started working on the book proposal, in order to submit them along with the writing. They had been deemed “just darling” by Caitlin, although of course none of them were of the professional caliber required to grace the cover of a book Delacorte hoped might be one of its bigger Fall ’09 titles. A professional photographer was therefore dispatched to our apartment with all due haste—and an entirely new phase in our lives began.

People who came to see us had always been interested in Homer. He was (the opinion of certain editors notwithstanding) an interesting little guy. But now began an influx of visitors who were only interested in Homer. My day would come eventually, further down the road, when it was time to do in-studio radio spots or phone interviews for newspapers and magazines. I was fated to become one of the luckiest “cat ladies” ever—because people wanted to hear me talk about my cat! At length! Sometimes for as long as an hour at a stretch!

The focus for now, however, was on turning Homer into a star. You’ve probably heard that stars aren’t born, they’re made. Well, I’m here to tell you that it’s true. Behind every star is an entire team of people invisible to the public. Not just the photographers, the editors, the lighting assistants, the stylists (or, in the case of a cat, professional groomers—although they learned quickly that our star strongly preferred not to have anyone but mom trim his claws or touch his paws, thank you very much). There are also managers, publicists, “stage moms,” personal assistants, gatekeepers, and lackeys whose job it is to keep the star happy and engaged, to get him out of his trailer in time for the shoot and in a suitable emotional state to work, to run and fetch whatever the star may want to eat or amuse himself with.

When it came to making Homer a star, all of those latter roles were filled by me—with an occasional assist from Laurence, who these days was working from home. (The L.A.-based entertainment magazine where he was an editor hadn’t laid off staff yet, but they had sent their Manhattan-based employees to work at home, so they could liquidate their New York office—which we took to be an ominous sign.) Laurence, however, would usually clear out for the day whenever our apartment was taken over for video or photo shoots.

“Managing” Homer soon became my full-time job. It was my responsibility to set his appointments; thoroughly brush and groom him ahead of time, so that his coat would shine with a high gloss and without any pesky stray bits of fur that might dangle from his haunches and ruin a shot; to make sure he got plenty of rest before a shoot began; to keep us stocked up on the tuna, turkey, and toys required to keep him engaged, happy, and playful; to wrangle him from spot to spot as the daylight or whims of whoever was shooting him changed.

I had to pop open cans of tuna when they wanted Homer to raise his head and perk up his ears; to dip toys and crumpled pieces of paper and bits of sisal rope in the tuna oil when Homer’s interest in them flagged and he’d start to trot over to me. Why aren’t you playing with any of this cool stuff, mom? I had to gauge when it was finally time for Homer to retire to the sanctity of his cat tree for a quick, replenishing cat nap. I’d gently suggest to whoever was in charge that Homer really could use a bit of time to himself—at which point he or she would cry, “That’s lunch, everybody!” and the cameramen, the sound crew (if it was a video shoot), the lighting techs, the groomer and stylist, the field producer, and the field producer’s assistant would ask me to recommend a nearby restaurant. And would I mind terribly calling ahead for a reservation, since they’d need a large table?

It was my job to do all these things and more and then…to get out of the shot.

I used to joke that my name might as well officially be changed to Gwen “Thank You Now Please Get Out Of The Shot” Cooper. “We’d like to shoot Homer in front of the bookcase—he looks adorable with all those books behind him! Thank you so much [after I’d lured Homer to the desired spot with a cheerful, Come on, Homer-Bear!]…but could you move juuuuuuust a little to the left? A little more? We can still see part of your arm.” Or, “I’d like to get Homer in front of the window. He’ll be majestic with the Manhattan skyline behind him. Could you get him to…yes…perfect, that’s it! But your hair is so curly and it’s interfering with Homer’s light—could you maybe pull it back?”

Far be it for me to interfere with Homer’s light!

If Homer had been a different kind of a cat—a cat like Scarlett, for example—all the “managing” in the world couldn’t have made these shoots possible. But Homer had always liked attention, and the people who gave it to him. He was intriguing not just because of his blindness, but because he had real charisma.

That might sound like an odd word to apply to a cat. Charisma, though, is little more than the ability of some people (or cats) to make you feel—even if only for the span of a few minutes—as if you are the most fascinating thing going, the very person they’d been hoping to get to spend time with.

Homer had that ability in spades.

Every strange person who came to our home and crawled on their belly holding a camera before them—so as to shoot Homer at his own level—was one more friend for him to make, one more cheerful greeting for him to bestow, receiving a playful scratch behind his ears in return. Scarlett and Vashti ran for the hills whenever our apartment was thus inundated, but Homer could never get over how much cool stuff these people brought with them! Cartons and crates, lighting reflectors, boom mics, duffel bags for Homer to crawl in, around, and over. His nose and whiskers would twitch non-stop as he tried to process all the exotic new smells of equipment bags that had been on airplanes, in studios and out on location shoots, perhaps even (in the case of the crew from Animal Planet) in the homes of other cats.

The camera crews came to our home as a team of seen-it-all professionals, out on just another job—and an annoying one at that, because what could be more irritating (or less interesting) than working with a cat?—but they left as an adoring cult. Like my former boyfriends of old, who’d proudly proclaimed, Homer’s my buddy!, each photographer and videographer was convinced that he or she had formed a unique and special bond with Homer over the course of the shoot, that some magical thing had happened between the two of them during those few hours they had together.

Homer could make you feel that way. He seemed to know precisely when they wanted him to sit still as a statue and look majestic, to chase around toys in goofy, kittenish fashion, to run or jump or flip around on his back with un-self-conscious abandon, to turn his head shyly a little to the side, as if to say, I’m strong, but also vulnerable. Maybe he even did know. Homer was a sensitive cat, one who’d always paid close attention to the people around him. He had ways of knowing things that even I couldn’t account for.

Do you see this?, they’d demand. Do you see how he’s responding to me? Click-click, the camera would go. He’s a great cat, Gwen, a really exceptional cat. And then they’d remind me, for the umpteenth time to, please, get out of the shot.

I knew that I hovered. Part of it was my old over-protectiveness, which reared up again and was hard to suppress as I watched strangers cluster around Homer, amidst walls of gear five times his size. As for Homer himself, he was almost never nervous with all the activity going on around him. All he needed to find these unprecedented new experiences completely enjoyable was the knowledge that I was somewhere nearby. But with so much going on—with so many people and so much equipment crammed within the relatively small space of our living room—it was difficult for him to catch my scent if I wasn’t standing close. Speaking to him in a reassuring voice wasn’t a great option, as it tended to cause him to leave off whatever he’d been doing and head in my direction.

As soon as Homer wasn’t sure I was there anymore—when the horrifying thought that I might have left him alone with all these strangers appeared to cross his mind—then he was capable of being as uncooperative as any irate star. The fur on his back would start to rise, he’d twist his head wildly in un-shoot-able postures, nose in the air as he tried to figure out my location. I’d rush over to pet him and smooth down his fur. I’m not going anywhere, Homer-Bear. I’m right here with you. Thus calmed and restored to cheerful good humor, Homer would once again return to the work at hand as if he’d been born to do it.

And I, of course, would hasten to get out of the shot.

ALL TOLD, THERE were only perhaps seven or eight of these shoots, stretched out over nearly as many months. But they loomed so large with their strangeness and excitement that they cast long shadows. As the count-down to Homer’s Odyssey’s publication date began, and as the anxiety and anticipation continued to build, it was hard to feel that our lives were quite what they had been only a few months ago—although it was equally hard to say just what, exactly, they were becoming.

Some of these shoots were arranged by my publisher for their own purposes—two sessions in our home in order to get the ideal cover shot of Homer (as well as extras to be used inside the book itself), and one at an off-site photographer’s studio for additional publicity shots of Homer and me together. I talked about that one in the Afterword for Homer’s Odyssey—the near impossibility of wrangling Homer in an unfamiliar space, trying to get him to stay still long enough to have his picture taken. All Homer himself wanted to do was explore this new place and introduce himself to all the new people within it. It was so very hard to get him to sit still that, as I noted in the Afterword, eventually the photographer and lighting techs unhooked all the equipment from its various stands and carried it by hand, so they could follow Homer wherever he went. As long as I live, I’ll never forget the sight of a team of professionals—and one hovering stage mom—following along behind a blind cat in parade-like fashion, crying, Wait! I think he’s going this way now!

People magazine wanted photos of Homer for insets to accompany the full-page review of the book they planned to run. Ladies Home Journal was going to excerpt a portion of Homer’s Odyssey—from the chapter describing the night Homer had chased off the burglar—in their September issue. For this shoot, along with the usual crew they also sent over to our apartment a hair-and-make-up person and wardrobe stylist for me. They wanted shots of Homer and me together to accompany the piece—shots of Homer lying on my chest, shots of Homer in my arms, shots of Homer nuzzling my ear. In the end, though, they ran a photo of just Homer by himself.

“The problem,” as I would later observe to a friend, when the issue came out and I saw that I wasn’t in it, “is that I didn’t get out of the shot.”

Animal Planet did a segment on Homer for their Cats 101 show. The segment was only a few minutes long, but it took a grueling eight hours to get all the footage they needed. Even Homer was spent by the end of the day, when our apartment was in shambles and all he wanted was to use his litter-box without having a cameraman closely following his movements. At one point, he turned with an indignant hiss on the cameraman, who followed behind him with dogged persistence. Do you mind? I’m trying to pee in privacy! I will say, though, that nobody we worked with knew how to record cats more unobtrusively than the Animal Planet crew. They were even able to capture the notoriously camera-shy Vashti and Scarlett, and there was no way any of us would have made it through a day that long without their expertise.

The coverage for USA Today happened in three waves. The books editor—the person who decided which books USA Today would cover; which of their various staff and freelance reviewers would be assigned to cover them; and who also wrote the revered-within-the-industry “Book Buzz” column, which a month earlier had decreed that, “Homer’s Odyssey will be huge,” causing bookstore pre-orders to quintuple overnight—was also a cat lover. (“So much for cat lovers not reading books,” I told my agent.). She wanted to do more with Homer’s Odyssey than simply have it reviewed, and she came over to our apartment to interview me personally—although I didn’t kid myself that so high-ranking a personage would have gone to all the trouble of coming to me if she hadn’t wanted to meet Homer as well.

Homer seemed almost relieved when someone came to our home wanting only to sit and chat, rather than putting him through his paces. He curled up in my lap for most of the interview, drowsy and comfortable as the editor reached out from time to time to stroke his head. “He really is a loving little guy, isn’t he,” she observed, and Homer rewarded this by pushing his entire face into her hand, his way of demanding that she rub him harder. For once, even Scarlett and Vashti ventured out, eager to feast upon the cat treats I’d scattered around liberally as a way of ensuring that Homer would stay in the living room throughout the interview and not head off to his “trailer”—i.e. the little cave in his cat tree. Homer, however, was more interested in the editor than in the treats, having had so many in recent weeks that he was becoming ever-so-slightly bored with them. (Ah, the ennui of stardom!)

A day later, a photographer from USA Today came to shoot Homer for the story—one lone photo-journalist and his camera, without all the rigging and light reflectors and duffle bags we’d become accustomed to. I was so used to being asked to…you know…get out of the shot that I was wearing work clothes, the hair I’d washed but hadn’t bothered styling that morning (because who cared what I looked like?) pulled back in an untidy ponytail. But the books editor had instructed the photographer to shoot Homer and me together—which is why, to my everlasting shame, Homer and I were immortalized in the pages of the nation’s biggest newspaper with me looking like I’d just finished moving furniture.

Homer, it goes without saying, looked sleek and shiny and impossibly perfect.

The day after that, a USA Today videographer arrived to film me reading an excerpt of Homer’s Odyssey while Homer scampered in the background, planning to post the video to the USA Today website and YouTube channel once the book had been released. I’d invested in a brand-new catnip toy for the occasion, in order to ensure maximum frolicking. Homer systematically demolished that toy over the course of the hour it took us to shoot, tearing it to shreds and releasing all the catnip into a giant mound in front of him, which he then rolled and flipped around in while his entire face became encrusted with ‘nip—until he looked like Al Pacino at the end of Scarface. The catnip made Homer talkative, and so that footage is one of the very few recordings in existence that captured the sound of Homer’s own voice—and, for that reason, I treasure it to this day.

Perhaps the craziest day was when we recorded the book trailer—the promotional video commissioned by my publisher for placement on YouTube and various other websites. They’d taken over a two-bedroom suite at the Hotel Pennsylvania for the shoot, across the street from Madison Square Garden, where many a visiting rocker had stayed and partied back in the hotel’s glory days.

They sent a town car to pick Homer and me up. Homer had been reluctant to get into his carrier, and it was raining as I dashed as quickly as I could from apartment building to car—although Homer did catch a few drops, which didn’t improve his mood. The driver helped me load in all the gear I’d thought necessary to bring along if we were going to be shooting out of the house for an entire day—a litter-box and litter, bowls for food and water and food to go in them, a sack of catnip, a bag of Pounce treats, and a large bag of rolling-and-belled toys. I was scheduled for an early-morning arrival—before seven—and I’d requested that as few people as necessary be there when we first arrived, so that Homer would have time to acclimate to a new place before it was time for the hair-and-makeup person to go to work on me, and the groomer to go to work on him.

There was a single cameraman there to greet us when we knocked on the door of the suite. He’d beaten us to the hotel by only an hour, having just arrived on a red-eye from L.A. for the purpose of recording Homer’s first hour of exploration. I set up food and water bowls for Homer in the kitchen, and placed the litter-box there as well, setting Homer in the litter-box first—as was our custom when I brought him to a new place—so that he wouldn’t have to wonder where it was.

“I’ve never seen such big aural canals in a cat,” the cameraman noted. “You can see all the way down into his ears. They’re huge!”

“Homer’s hearing is off the charts,” I agreed, as Homer’s head perked up at the sound of my saying his name, and he turned the ears we’d just been discussing in my direction.

“Are you sure he’s never been here before?” The cameraman was watching as Homer—nose to the ground—began to figure out the suite and its various rooms. He didn’t bump into a single thing, not a wall, not a sofa, not the cabinets in the kitchen or a lamp in the suite’s living room. Homer’s sensitive nose and remarkable whiskers gave him all the information he needed to navigate seamlessly—just as he’d done time after time in the many homes we’d moved in and out of, back in our earlier years of struggle and constant migration. After about a half-hour of thorough investigation, Homer happily took up play with a catnip ball, fascinated with the way it ricocheted off the bottom of the kitchen cabinets and into the living room. He chased it in and out of bedrooms, under tables, around the sofa and floor lamps, without losing track of it for even a moment.

“I can’t believe he’s blind,” the cameraman marveled. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but if it weren’t for the fact that his eyes are gone, I’d say you were lying.”

I laughed. “My husband says the same thing,” I told him. “To this day, he swears that Homer’s faking blindness.”

It was a long day, and the suite began to fill up as the morning wore on. The next to arrive were Homer’s and my respective groomers, followed by another cameraman, a lighting tech with trees and enormous reflective panels (“It’s hard to get the lighting just right on a black cat,” he explained—which I already knew), a sound person with boom mics, a producer, Caitlin, and my publisher’s Vice President of Marketing, who had arrived to supervise the shoot personally.

But, with all the primping and preparation, with all the setting up of equipment and moving of furniture, with all the phone calls and consultations and last-minute disagreements about the shot list (which detailed the specific things they wanted to capture Homer doing), it was hours before the shoot proper—wherein I would answer questions about Homer and the book, while Homer did various adorable and active things in the background—even started.

By then, as was his preferred habit on rainy days when thunder rolled with a pleasant far-away rumble beneath the sounds of drops splashing against the windows, Homer wasn’t interested in doing anything but napping. He wasn’t upset. He was friendly as ever when new people came over to greet him and introduce themselves. He was simply bored. All the hoopla over the last few months, all the duffel bags and equipment and strangers and cat treats, all the new toys and the cameras following him to catch his every movement as he sat or ran or stretched or jumped or rolled over, had become old hat. All Homer wanted to do now was sit quietly on the couch behind my head, the way we did on rainy days when we were home alone and I read a book while Homer snoozed peacefully beside me.

Everybody’s eyes were on me. But, as every cat person knows, there’s only so much you can do with an uncooperative cat. I tried opening a baggie of catnip and wafting it under his nose. Nothing. I tried jangling a belled toy next to his ear. No response.

I got up and walked across the room. “Homer,” I cooed. “Homer, come over to mommy.”

Homer flicked one ear lazily in the direction of my voice, but didn’t stir. Nah, he seemed to say. Don’t wanna.

“Homer-Bear,” I sing-songed. I tried rattling a bag of Pounces. “Do you want a treat, Homer? Do you want to come and get a kitty treat, baby boy?”

Homer yawned mightily and extended his front and hind legs in a long, languorous stretch. He flipped onto his back momentarily, then curled back into a ball and continued to nap.

And so, here we were. A room full of people, a crew of professionals who’d flown through the night all the way from the West Coast, my publisher’s Vice President of Marketing (upon whom, I couldn’t help but feel, I was making a very bad impression), all the treats and toys any cat would want—all of it here for Homer, and only for Homer, and Homer himself couldn’t be bothered. He’d already been there. He’d already done that.

“Let me make a call,” I told the room, and went to dig my cell out of my purse so I could phone Laurence at home.

“I need you,” I told him as soon as he answered. “We need half a pound of that sliced deli turkey Homer likes, and a whole bunch of those little cans of tuna. Do you think you could go to the grocery store and then bring it all here?”

“Yeah, sure.” Laurence sounded surprised, but willing to help. “What do you want, Chicken of the Sea?”

“No, no.” I was beginning to sound frantic. “Not Chicken of the Sea! He likes Bumble Bee, Laurence. Homer likes Bumble Bee!”

There was a pause, and then we both began to laugh. We laughed until we were practically crying. Tears ran down my face and my stomach began to ache, making it hard to breathe as I tried to suppress the laughter, aware that all the people in the other room could probably hear me.

Our lives had gotten a little crazy. But Homer wasn’t some diva, and we weren’t his flunkies. Homer was still just Homer—the good-natured, high-spirited little boy we fondled and fussed over at home, in private, as soon as the cameras were packed up and gone.

I’d been making myself crazy in part because—yes—I desperately wanted my book to be a success. What author doesn’t want that? I knew how incredibly rare it was for a publisher to put this kind of effort and attention into a book, that this particular moment in my life was fleeting and one I needed to enjoy as it was happening, because Homer and I wouldn’t be the flavor of the month forever.

But it was more than that. I was also proud of Homer—not just of the ease and dignity with which he’d been acquitting himself as all these unusual and unprecedented things were happening to us. I was proud of who he was. I felt entirely vindicated in all the years of faith I’d had in him. And I wanted others to see that. I wanted the whole world to see—naysayers I’d never even met and probably never would, who nevertheless I knew would think, Why would anybody want a blind cat? I wanted everybody to view for themselves what a blind cat—my blind cat—could do. The veterinarian from whom I’d adopted Homer was writing the Foreword to Homer’s Odyssey, and I had an idea that some of the people who’d had the chance to adopt him but turned him down, all those years ago, might read this book. They might put two and two together, they might realize what they had discarded as if it were nothing. Their loss had been my infinite gain, but still I wanted them to view Homer with amazement, to read his story with envy and think, That could have been me.

And, although I generally didn’t consider myself a vindictive person, I wanted to make that one publisher who’d called Homer “creepy” eat her words. I wanted to make her rue the day she’d turned from him in disgust. I’ll show you “creepy,” I’d say to myself, in steely tones.

Before any of that would happen, however, there was still our immediate problem to contend with—a cat already bored with a fame he technically hadn’t attained yet, and the necessity of recapturing his interest just long enough to make it through this last shoot.

“I’ll be there as soon as I can with turkey and tuna,” Laurence promised, when we had finished laughing.

“Thank you,” I told him. “Oh—and make sure it’s the fancy albacore. That’s his favorite.”

Laurence ran out to the grocery store in the rain, waited forever to find a cab—which was always tougher on soggy days like this—and sat in the heavy crosstown traffic for nearly half an hour as he crossed from Second Avenue to where we were waiting at the Hotel Pennsylvania on Seventh. Once he arrived, we had to open a slew of those little cans of tuna before the sound of cans opening and the aroma of fish filling the room intrigued Homer enough to rouse him from his slumber. Laurence went into the suite’s kitchen and rattled the paper Homer’s favorite turkey was wrapped in, actually going through the motions of making a sandwich until Homer rose languidly from the sofa and trotted into the kitchen to paw at Laurence’s leg. Hey—is that turkey?

The shoot ran longer than scheduled, but in the end we got the footage of Homer we needed. I took a look at the demolished suite as I was packing up Homer and his gear to head back home. Furniture had been pushed around haphazardly. Lampshades were skewed at odd angles, positioned this way and that to better cast the light onto Homer’s black fur. Cameras and lighting reflectors were lying on the floor or leaned against end tables. Nearly two dozen small, half-opened cans of tuna were scattered on every imaginable surface, along with uneaten bits of turkey strewn across the floor, laid there to tempt Homer into various spots. The whole space was torn apart, as if a herd of wild animals had stampeded their way through.

I shook my head in amazement as I took it all in, thinking, Well, I guess we’ve finally arrived. Homer had trashed his first hotel room. He was officially a star.