Making the Cat Laugh: One Woman's Journal of Single Life On the Margins - Hardcover

Truss, Lynne

3.31

274 ratings by Goodreads

9780241135426: Making the Cat Laugh: One Woman's Journal of Single Life On the Margins

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0241135427 ISBN 13: 9780241135426

Publisher: Hamish Hamilton, 1995

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A collection of essays about the vicissitudes and strange pleasures of living alone with only cats to hear your thoughts. We discover a writer not only obsessed with cats, but prone to over-reacting generally to all life's little irritations.

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Review:

Making the Cat Laugh collects the various humorous columns that demonstrated just how witty Lynn Truss always was even before she decided to concentrate her formidable intelligence and sharpness on punctuation. Fans of Eats, Shoots & Leaves will recognise the flights of comic invention and exaggeration: what might otherwise be quite conventional pieces about living alone in your 30s with a cat become vivid and original. The self-mockery never becomes self-indulgently masochistic even when she realises, for example, that a friend who had told her to see Batman Returns and remarked that Truss reminds her of Catwoman, is thinking of the batty spinster, not the reborn super-villainous sex-bomb.

There is a visual precision to the jokes here as well as a verbal one--casual remarks about Quentin Tarantino when he was still comparatively obscure have remained accurate and current. This is a collection that passes the standard, but still useful, test for collections of comic journalism: even read in bulk (for example on public transport) it's still funny enough to make you laugh out loud. --Roz Kaveney

Review:

A small masterpiece of comedy...with abundant close observation, the familiar is made fresh...A continual hoot -- The Times

A truly inventive comic writer ... You should not attempt to read Making the Cat Laugh while travelling on public transport -- The Irish Times

[Lynne Truss is] a social humorist of sharp insight and startling candour -- Scotland on Sunday

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