Tag Archives: non-fiction

Wish You Were Here – John Allore & Patricia Pearson

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I don’t read too much true crime these days, but Wish You Were Here, the story of a young woman who goes missing from her university residence in Sherbrooke, Quebec and is later discovered in a farmer’s field, sounded interesting and, the girl’s parents live (lived) in Saint John, NB, which is my home town.

In 1979 (the year I graduated from high school), a body is discovered. It’s later determined that this is Theresa Allore, a student at Champlain College, who had disappeared without a trace in November 1978.

Co-author Patricia Pearson, who was a friend of the family (and for a short time dated Theresa’s brother, John) recalls Theresa as being “intelligent, independent, witty” .

The police at the time seemed to do very little investigative work to determine exactly what happened to Theresa when she first went missing. In fact, they told the Allore family that

their daughter, a fearless girl who rock-climbed and skydived and was excelling at school, had overdosed on drugs (unspecified) and had been taken (surely) from her dorm to the creek a mile or so away by panicked friends. They’d heard speculative talk of her choking on vomit, or perhaps having an allergic reaction. The friends must have dumped her, the police explained, after stripping off her clothes and stealing her purse and tossing her wallet in a ditch. As friends do.

Many years later, John and Patricia try to do what the police never manage: find out what happened to Theresa. Thus begins their exhaustive search for the truth, which is hindered by missing evidence, a closed-ranks system (both at the college and within the police force) and the passage of time.

At the time this happened, I wouldn’t have been much younger than Theresa, but I can’t say I remember anything about her murder. Shows you how oblivious we sometimes are as teenagers. Wish You Were Here is a thoughtfully written (and how could it not be) examination of the devastating impact of a violent death, the problems inherent in the criminal justice system, and the dangers facing young women.

Visit John Allore’s blog Who Killed Theresa? Allore worked tirelessly for families of missing and murdered young women until his accidental death in 2023.

Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now – Jaron Lanier

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I grew up in an era where we were told too much television would rot our brains. Turns out, our brains are rotting because of a little device that every person in the world, toddlers even, carry around in their pockets. I can see my high school students rolling their eyes at me: blame it on the phones. They don’t know a life when phones weren’t melded to their palms, though. They don’t actually know what they’re missing and what’s being stolen from them.

When Facebook was launched in 2004, I had two young children and no interest. I think I called it FaceDevil or something. But then FOMO kicked in; all my friends were on there and I just gave in and joined. For a while it was okay, I guess. It was nice to catch up with people I hadn’t seen in a long time and share a little bit of my life. There are all sorts of reasons why the platform has become shittier over the last few years and I opted out in January 2025. Don’t miss it at all. Yes, I still have Instagram; yes, that has to go too.

Jaron Lanier, a well-known computer scientist, author, and philosopher makes a compelling pitch to ditch your social media accounts in his book of essays Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now. His argument, that social media platforms are turning us into nasty sheeple lacking in critical thinking skills and ripe for being duped by bad actors, is both horrifying and motivating. Lanier encourages us to be like a cat (which is an apt simile since cute cat videos started taking over the Internet in 2005. And let’s face it, who doesn’t love watching cats get scared out of their wits by tinfoil?) Cats, Lanier suggests

have done the seemingly impossible: They’ve integrated themselves into the modern high-tech world without giving themselves up. They are still in charge. There is no worry that some stealthy meme crafted by algorithms and paid for by a creepy, hidden oligarch has taken over your cat

We, however, are not cats. Every interaction on social media is being tracked or, as Lanier explains, is a BUMMER (Behavior of Users Modified and Made into an Empire for Rent). BUMMER, simply put, is a “statistical machine that lives in the clouds. It gathers data from users to whom it has no responsibility and uses that data to manipulate the user and make tremendous profit while simultaneously undermining the economic dignity of the user…with Google and Facebook we are not the customers, we are the product.” (Law & Liberty)

Big Brother is watching and he’s not benevolent.

It is hard to be optimistic about the state of the world given the current political landscape. Lanier’s argument in the essay “Social media is undermining truth” is that

People are clustered into paranoia peer groups because then they can be more easily and predictable swayed….The only reason BUMMER reinforces this stuff is that paranoia turns out, as a matter of course, to be an efficient way of corralling attention.

…

In order to benefit in the long term as technology improves, we have to find a way to not let our improved comfort and security turn into cover for a lazy drift into perilous fantasy. Media forms that promote truth are essential for survival, but the dominant media of our age do no such thing.

I come from a generation of newspaper readers. The paper came every evening and we all read it. We watched the supper hour news. News was impartial (or, okay, at least somewhat objective.) Journalism has been steadily eroded and more and more young people get their news from TikTok influencers. Truth, so it seems, is fluid. Or, if you’re Fox News, optional.

In his essay “Social media is destroying your capacity for empathy”, Lanier argues that our “worldview is distorted” and that we “have less awareness of other people’s worldviews.” Empathy, let’s face it, has been seriously eroded as we are pitted against each other by the powers that be. They’re coming for your jobs; interaction with trans or gay people will make you trans or gay. One of my favourite lines from Harper Lee’s novel To Kill a Mockingbird is when Atticus tells Scout “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view…until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it.” It’s one of the things I love about teaching high school English, encouraging my students to read widely and see that there are other ways of looking at things, that not everyone has the same experience that you have. Of course, as Trump defunds schools and libraries and bans books, well, I guess that’s a topic for another day. (I should also point out that I am Canadian and watching the dumpster fire that is what is happening in the US with abject horror.)

Lanier isn’t a fan of Trump either but he says “What’s really going on is that we see less than ever before of what others are seeing, so we have less opportunity to understand each other.” It seems like the exact opposite of what the Internet should/could be facilitating: a way to see that we share the planet and the human experience and we should be working together for the betterment of both of those things.

But it doesn’t, and that’s a bummer.

As Lanier says, “Delete your accounts!”

Remembering Satan -Lawrence Wright

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Lawrence Wright is a staff writer for The New Yorker magazine. He is a prolific writer who has turned his journalist’s gaze on a variety of subjects including Scientology, terrorism and in his 1993 book Remembering Satan, the Satanic panic which swept America in the 1980s.

Paul and Sandy Ingram were raising their family of four (two sons and to daughters) in Olympia, Washington. Paul was the chief civil deputy for the sheriff’s office and an active member of both the Republican party and the Church of Living Water, a Protestant fundamentalist church. On November 28, 1988, Paul was called into his boss’s office and asked if he was aware that his daughters, Erika, 22, and Julie, 18 had filed against him. They allege that their father had sexually molested them over a period of several years. Paul’s strange response was “I can’t see myself doing this.”

This is the beginning of a long, complicated investigation that makes zero sense from the outside looking in…especially for anyone reading this book now in 2024 and who has watched hours of crime dramas on television. The girls’ stories get increasingly more convoluted. Pretty soon, it wasn’t just their father, but their older brother, their mother and the police officers who often played poker with their father in the family home. And why were all these people involved? Because they were part of some sort of satanic cult. There is not a single shred of physical evidence, though, despite the girls’ claims that they were tortured, covered in scars, and that there were the bodies of dozens of babies buried on the Ingram property.

Satanic panic originated in 1980 with the publication of the book Michelle Remembers. “Michelle Remembers, written by Canadians Michelle Smith and her husband, psychiatrist Lawrence Pazder, was published in 1980. Now discredited, the book was written in the form of an autobiography, presenting the first modern claim that child abuse was linked to Satanic rituals. According to the “memoir”, at the age of five Michelle was tortured by her mother for days in “elaborate satanic rituals”. As the torture reached a climax, a portal to hell opened and Satan himself appeared, only to be driven away by the Virgin Mary and the archangel Michael. Explanations for a lack of any evidence of abuse on Michelle’s body were that it had been miraculously removed by St. Mary. Not explained was testimony from Michelle’s father and two sisters, contradicting the memoir, as well as a 1955/56 St. Margaret’s School yearbook. The yearbook includes a photo taken in November 1955 showing Michelle attending school and appearing healthy, when according to Pazder’s book Michelle spent that month imprisoned in a basement. (Wiki)

Over the next decade, there were -according to Wikipedia – over 12,000 cases of unsubstantiated abuse in America. It is fascinating watching how this seemingly normal family (or at least, not Satanists) got caught up in this conspiracy and how the investigators, against their better judgement and expertise, came to believe the girls despite the numerous red flags and inconsistencies in their statements.

It’s a fascinating story.

Paperbacks from Hell – Grady Hendrix

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Grady Hendrix (The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires, My Best Friend’s Exorcism) digs through the horror vault in Paperbacks from Hell. Subtitled The Twisted History of ’70s and ’80s Horror Fiction, Hendrix, no slouch himself when it comes to things that go bump in the night, traces the history of mainstream horror fiction and his observations are both astute and often comical.

For anyone who grew up in the 1970s, lots of these authors will be familiar. Personally I was reading a lot of Stephen King back then, and there’s not really a lot about him in this book. Instead, Paperbacks from Hell (mostly) looks at the seedier side of horror, tracing the resurrection of the genre to Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby, Thomas Tyron’s The Other and William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist.

As Hendrix explains “All three spawned movies and, most importantly, set the tone for the next two decades of horror publishing.

Hendrix catalogues the specific sub-genres of horror, everything from satanic cults, haunted houses, explicit sex, creepy kids, possessed animals, zombies and vampires. The book is filled with lots of amusing turns of phrase and enough specifics to make a horror aficionado happy.

Then there’s the cover art. If you have any interest in pulp horror from this period – you should just go right ahead and order the book. It’s a whole lot of creepy fun.

This would make a great gift for any horror reader on your list. And while you’re at it – pick up one of Hendrix’s novels, too. He clearly loves the genre and he’s a great writer.

Into Every Generation A Slayer is Born: How Buffy Slayed Our Hearts – Evan Ross Katz

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Almost twenty-five years ago, I happened upon the tail end of a television show where two people were staring at each other across a smoke-filled parking lot. There was so much longing in their eyes, I was immediately captivated. I didn’t know what the show was; I didn’t know who these actors were. I knew nothing but that fraught moment – and it changed my life.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003) and its spin-off series, Angel (1999-2004) sucked me into a world I did not know existed: fandom. First of all, I had to rent all of the episodes of the show I hadn’t seen – three seasons’ worth. That was back in the days of Blockbuster, way before dvds and streaming. I am not sure what sent me down the internet rabbit hole, but down it I went. That’s where I discovered websites devoted to Buffy and fanfiction and then LiveJournal. It was a slippery slope, people. When I finally decided to try my hand at fanfiction – because I have always been a writer – well, that was so much fun. Then I decided to build my own (now defunct) website, which I coded from scratch. I attended two Buffy fanfiction writers’ conventions, one in Las Vegas and one in Atlanta. I met so many talented writers and made so many amazing friends. It was a a lot of fun.

The pinnacle of my time in fandom was when David Boreanaz (who played Angel) came to New Brunswick to shoot the movie These Girls and I got to go to set and meet him. I was not okay.

Fandom was a huge part of my life for about a decade, and then life just got busier, the shows ended and I gradually stepped away. All my fanfic lives at Archive of Our Own and there are still people reading, which is lovely, but for the most part fandom is in the rearview mirror. My love for these shows, however, is not.

So, when Evan Ross Katz’s book Into Every Generation A Slayer is Born: How Buffy Staked Our Hearts came out, there was no question that I was going to read it. The book examines Buffy‘s place in pop culture – and it has a place and I will fight anyone who says otherwise. People who dismiss the show because of the movie (which even though Joss Whedon wrote the screenplay was not ultimately his vision of what it could be) or because of the show’s name, don’t have a clue. The show is profoundly moving, often laugh-out-loud funny, creepy, witty, and layered. You can watch it a million times and always see something new.

Katz is clearly a fan of the show. He says “to love Buffy is to both contextualize and reexamine it.” It is a show the has spawned legions of rabid fans (see above), dissertations, volumes of analysis, billions of words of fanfiction, university courses. It’s a show that keeps on giving. A couple of years ago I rewatched all seven seasons with my son and I was amazed by how well it has held up, and how many new things I spotted. Still made me laugh. Still made me cry.

But it is also a show that, ultimately, unmasked Joss Whedon as a misogynist – which was crushing for those of us who thought he had our backs. This is one of those instances where I have to be willing to separate the art from the artist. Trust me, I don’t wear my “Joss Whedon is my master now” shirt anymore.

Katz examines Sarah Michelle Gellar’s glorious portrayal of the titular character. Gellar shares her memories of the show, her working relationship with other castmates and her thoughts about playing the “one girl in all the world.”

“As an actor, you want to do something that leaves a mark, that makes a difference, that stands the test of time […] So the fact that twenty-five years later, we’re still talking about it means that I did something right. And I think that with time comes appreciation.

The book also shares the thoughts of Nicholas Brendan (Xander), Charisma Carpenter (Cordelia), Seth Green (Oz), Anthony Stewart Head (Giles), and James Marsters (Spike) as well as many other recurring cast members (but not a single mention of Wesley Wyndam-Pryce (Alexis Denisof; it was like he didn’t even exist in the Buffyverse! and a planned interview with Alyson Hannigan (Willow) fell through.) Other major actors, David Boreanaz, for example, spoke through quotes taken from previously published interviews – so nothing new. Bummer.

The book looks at story arcs, queer and BIPOC representation, the writers’ room, and Joss Whedon himself, especially his toxicity on the set and his mistreatment of female actresses, particularly Charisma Carpenter. It also talks about Buffy’s relationships with Angel, Spike and Riley; it seems pretty obvious that Katz is team Angel and so we agree on that at least.

I had a lot of fun reading this book. It wasn’t groundbreaking or anything, but that didn’t diminish my enjoyment of revisiting this show or these characters who occupied so much space in my life and introduced me to people from all over the world. I will always love these characters and this world.

Buffy and Angel 4eva!

Reader, Come Home – Maryanne Wolf

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There’s lots of Maryanne Wolf’s book Reader, Come Home, that I did not understand. Y’know, science-y stuff. I read this book, written as a series of letters addressed to readers, with my highlighter in hand and I found it extremely compelling. Wolf is a scientist with a particular interest in how the human brain learns to read and how digital media is impacting our reading lives, in particular, the lives of young readers. As a person who spends a fair amount of time on line, but does the bulk of my reading the old fashioned way, I found her research and observations fascinating. And, of course, as a teacher who is very committed to getting my students to read for pleasure, I found her insights alarming.

Instead of ‘reviewing’ this book, I will just share a few of the many things Wolf offered that either reinforced my own feelings or provided food for thought. Although I didn’t understand a lot of the brain science stuff, Reader, Come Home was accessible and easy to read and I think should be required reading for literacy teachers and anyone else who is at all concerned by the way people consume digital media. That said, Wolf isn’t anti-digital. I think we can all agree that there’s no turning back the clock on the way digital media has taken over our lives. She offers a thoughtful compromise that takes into account our dependence on our smart phones and tablets, and while she isn’t an alarmist necessarily, her research definitely reveals some alarming insights.

Here are just a handful of things Wolf says that gave me pause:

There would be many things that would be lost if we slowly lose the cognitive patience to immerse ourselves in the worlds created by books and the lives and feelings of the “friends” who inhabit them.

*

Without sufficient background knowledge, the rest of the deep-reading proccesses will be deployed less often, leading to a situation in which many people will never move outside the boundaries of what they already know.

*

…the average person consumes about 34 gigabytes across varied devices each day. Basically, that’s the equivalent of close to 100, 000 words a day.

*

…”skimming” is the new normal in our digital reading.

*

…consider the increasing unease of many English professors in universities and in high schools that growing numbers of their students no longer have the “patience” to read literature from the nineteenth century and early half of the twentieth century.

*

I have begun to question the cognitive loss of not being willing, or perhaps in the future, even able to navigate the demands of the complex concepts in denser prose.

*

…student writing is deteriorating [and] we must ask whether current students’ diminishing familiarity with conceptually demanding prose and the daily truncating of their writing on social media is affecting their writing in more negative ways than in the past.

*

In a 2015 RAND report, the average amount of time spent by three-to five-year-old children on digital devices was four hours a day. […] These issues become more intensified for older children, as the hours spent in front of screens double and triple to twelve-plus hours a day among many adolescents.

If you are even remotely interested in the impact of reading in the digital age, Reader, Come Home offers much food for thought. As a reader, I found it both horrifying and reassuring.

Alone Time – Stephanie Rosenbloom

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As I contemplate my retirement, I am also thinking about the places I would like to visit – not a bucket list, per se, but a wish list. (Bucket list always sounds so ‘end of days’ to me.) The last time I traveled was pre- pandemic when I went to Italy with three of my best friends. At the end of our time together, I tacked on a week of solo travel, just to see if I would like it. Could I navigate unfamiliar places and enjoy my own company? I wondered.

My selfie game is not strong, I realize. 🙂

Stephanie Rosenbloom’s book Alone Time seeks to answer the very question I was trying to figure out back in 2018. Can I go it alone? Turns out, I could and it was kind of amazing. After two of our party of four headed back to Canada, my friend Sheila and I went from Amalfi to Verona, a city I had always wanted to visit. Then, after she left to return home, I went to Bologna, another Italian city I hadn’t yet been to. After a few days there, I made a pit stop in Paris, a place I had never visited but thought, since my flight was routed through there, I should at least stop off and see the highlights. I fell in love with the city of lights and can’t wait to return.

Rosenbloom had an epiphany about solo travel while on assignment (she’s a journalist) for the Travel section of the New York Times. She was in Paris to write a story called “Solo in Paris.” She could write whatever she wanted.

Each morning I left my hotel in the 9th arrondissement, just east of the apartment where Proust wrote much of Remembrance of Things Past, and didn’t return until I had gone some twenty miles in whichever direction whim and croissants (and olive fougasse and pistachio financiers) took me.

Without having to consider anyone else’s agenda, Rosenbloom was able to see “le merveilleux quotidien” (roughly translated to ‘the marvelous everyday life’). It was this experience that encouraged her to consider more solo travel, and it’s these adventures that she shares in Alone Time.

Over the course of the book, Rosenbloom shares her experiences in Paris (another visit), Istanbul, Florence, and New York. (She’s a New Yorker, but as someone who has played the game of tourist in my own city, I appreciated her home town’s inclusion in the exercise.) Alone Time isn’t just a travel memoir, though. Rosenbloom talks a lot about the benefits of being alone, and of slowing life down to savour the minutiae of everyday life. Without an itinerary, she’s able to go where she pleases and stop when she wants, and that is something that definitely appeals to me.

Alone Time also encourages one to follow their passions. When you travel alone you only have to please yourself. For me, that would probably include visiting all the bookish places and I know that probably isn’t all that exciting to other people. I know that when we were in Amalfi, there was a handmade paper-making museum not too far from where we were staying. It wasn’t interesting to anyone but me, so I went by myself.

I very much enjoyed Alone Time. If the pandemic has taught me anything, it’s that I am introverted at heart. I love people and as a teacher I have no problem standing in front of a class, but I really enjoy quiet time. The older I get, the more I crave time alone with my books and a cup of tea. Rosenbloom’s book appealed to that part of me who, after a lifetime of pleasing others, just wants to please herself. Solo travel is definitely a way to do that.

Rosenbloom calls her book “a love letter to loners, to witches and shamans, to those who cherish their friends, spouses, and partners, yet also want alone time to think, create, have an adventure, learn a skill, or solve a problem.” It’s all that, and more.

Highly recommended.

If I Knew Then – Jann Arden

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Jann Arden is a Canadian singer-songwriter, actress, writer, animal rights activist, vegan and all around kick-ass human being. I have been a fan of hers for at least thirty years, which is why when she made a cameo in the 60th birthday video my daughter, Mallory, made for me I was speechless. She sang a little of “Good Mother”, offered a book recommendation (The Overstory by Richard Powers) and was charming as all get out.

Her non-fiction book If I Knew Then is a memoir about aging and is written with Jann’s trademark honesty and humour. She calls a spade a spade and I appreciate that about her.

One morning a few months after I turned fifty, I remember stopping dead in the middle of my usual routine

[…]

Suddenly it was as though I was staring at the most beautiful map of the world. I saw all the places I had been, all the things I had done, all the strength and service my arms and legs and shoulders and feet had given me for so many years, even though I had put this body through such bullshit and abuse and neglect and shame and loathing. All of that crap.

Jann tells stories about her complicated relationship with her father (who died in 2015), her devotion to her mother (who died of Alzheimer’s disease, which Jann recounts in her book Feeding My Mother) and the personal mistakes she made on her way to becoming, as she puts it, a “crone.”

The Crone is remarkably wise and unapologetic. She is fierce and forward-thinking – someone who is at the pinnacle of her own belonging. Okay, I’m not entering the time of the Crone. I am a Crone. I am at the beginning of a new chapter in my life – a whole new book, really. And it’s one that’s going to read and unfold exactly the way I want it to.

If I Knew Then has lots to offer a woman of any age. Although Jann is talking about herself in her 50s, maybe a younger woman could use some of her hard-won wisdom. For instance, if only I had appreciated my body a little more when I was 30. I didn’t think I was skinny enough or fit enough back then, pre-kids, but now when I see pictures of myself from that era, I am whoa! I also had a complicated relationship with my alcoholic father and I adored my mother. I don’t think I ever appreciated how difficult it was to be a parent though until I was a parent myself. My parents were never young to me; they were always just my parents. Both are gone now, too, and there are so many things I wish I could ask them. And apologies I’d like to make.

Jann’s book gives you permission to acknowledge your mistakes, and to move beyond them. She stresses the point that it is our failures that make us better human beings, that failing is, in fact, “a necessity.” Sometimes we need to be reminded that true learning comes from not getting it right the first or fourteenth time around and that “Good things come out of bad things.”

Fans of Jann Arden will certainly enjoy If I Knew Then, but even if you’re not familiar with her, this book is an enjoyable, personal (but universal) examination of a life lived, wrinkles and all.

How Reading Changed My Life – Anna Quindlen

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Anna Quindlen’s (Every Last One) essay How Reading Changed My Life is an essay every book lover will enjoy. I call it an essay because it’s just 70 pages long, but maybe reading memoir is more appropriate. Quindlen recounts her early days as a reader, the value books have had in her life, and (given that this was published in 1998) a look at the future of books in the digital age.

Reading has always been my home, my sustenance, my great invincible companion. “Book love,” Trollope called it. “It will make your hours pleasant to you as long as you live.” Yet of all the many things in which we recognize some universal comfort – God, sex, food, family, friends – reading seems to be the one in which the comfort is most undersung, at least publicly, although it was really all I thought of, or felt, when I was eating up book after book, running away from home while sitting in that chair, traveling around the world and yet never leaving the room.

Quindlen’s essay sings the praises of being a book drunkard and is critical of the notion that we should be reading solely as “a tool for advancement.” Of course I read to learn things, but I am mostly a pleasure reader, a ludic reader. I have piles of books everywhere and hundreds of unread books on my bookshelves because I will get to them some day. I swear.

Quindlen, too, reads for pleasure. She shares her memories of the first book that “seized [her] completely by the throat”, so much so that she read it and reread it, believing that it was “the best book ever written.” Of course, now she admits it’s probably – critically speaking, at least – not very good, but still finds it “a good read, but no longer a masterwork.” All readers have a book like this in their personal canon. Mine is probably Velocity. I mean, that book probably isn’t high art, but I’ve read it more than any other book and it still guts me. Quindlen allows for reading that is personal; there is no room for snobbery, and I appreciate that.

…if readers use words and stories as much, or more, to lesson human isolation as to expand human knowledge, is that somehow unworthy, invalid, and unimportant?

Preach!

How Reading Changed My Life tackles censorship (“It is difficult not to think of that clarion call, of the notion of forbidden fruit, looking at the list of America’s banned books.”), assigned reading (“In fact, one of the most pernicious phenomena in assigned reading is the force-feeding of serious work at an age when the reader will feel pushed away, not from the particular book being assigned, but from an entire class of books, or even books in general.”) and books in the digital age (“It is not possible that the book is over. Too many people love it so.”)

This book is a delight. Highly recommended.

A Street Cat Named Bob – James Bowen

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There was no way I wasn’t going to fall in love with James Bowen’s story about being a recovering heroin addict who befriends a stray tomcat in London. I stumbled across a clip of the movie and I was blubbering by the time it was done. Then I tracked down the full movie (Amazon Prime, I believe). There was no question that I was going to read the book A Street Cat Named Bob. 

Here’s a little taste of the film.

Bob turns out to be a lifesaver for James who is in a methadone program when he encounters the feline curled up on the mat in front of a neighbour’s apartment door. He makes an attempt to find Bob’s owner, but the truth is in a city the size of London it’s just not possible, and it seems as though Bob has been living rough for a little while, anyway. It costs James his last 30 quid to get Bob the antibiotics he needs.

bobSoon, Bob is hopping the bus  with James to to head to Covent Garden, where he busks daily. Bob turns out to be a real draw and the first day Bob is with him while he busks, James triples the money he normally made.

Despite the gut feeling I had that this cat and I were somehow destined to be together, a large part of me figured that he’d eventually go off and make his own way. It was only logical. He’d wandered into my life  and he was going to wander back out again at some point.

But Bob doesn’t wander off. He is a steadfast and loyal companion. Bowen’s book traces his relationship with Bob, and the tremendously positive impact the feline has on his life. Suddenly, James understands what it is to have another living thing that depends on you.

Bob and  James soon become a fixture around Covent Garden. Bob often rides on James’s shoulder and the attention is both positive and negative. Eventually he gives up busking and starts selling Big Issue. Again, Bob causes people to stop and pay attention.

Being with Bob had already taught me a lot about responsibility but the Big Issue took that to another level. If I wasn’t responsible and organized I didn’t earn money. And if I didn’t earn money Bob and I didn’t eat.

James makes the decision to wean himself off methadone and soon he feels better than he has in years and “the thought of returning to the dark dependencies of the past made me shiver. I had come too far now to turn back.”

I loved James’s redemption story. He and Bob were constant companions until Bob’s death June 15th at the age of 14. Of his friend’s death Bowen said: “Bob saved my life. It’s as simple as that. He gave me so much more than companionship. With him at my side, I found a direction and purpose that I’d been missing. The success we achieved together through our books and films was miraculous. He’s met thousands of people, touched millions of lives. There’s never been a cat like him. And never will again.”