An actress searches for her cat in Los Angeles.
After Cleo, Gershon’s beloved cat, was lost by her flaky assistant, she went to extreme lengths to find him. She skulked around West Hollywood in the early-morning hours with a can of tuna and a knife, meeting a kindly newspaper deliveryman along the way; she consulted Ellen Degeneres’ pet psychic; she got spit on by a Santeria priest during a live chicken sacrifice; and she attended workshops by scam-artist swamis. In the end, none of these desperate, expensive measures were necessary: Cleo was returned by someone who saw one of Gershon’s many “lost cat” posters. When Sonia, the pet psychic, first told her that “two spirits” would help her find Cleo, she immediately interpreted that to mean her uncle Jack and her friend Ted, both of whom had passed away recently. She took this prediction as evidence of the psychic’s reliability, but, later in the book, she wonders if the newspaper deliveryman was one of the spirits. Gershon insists on a sort of magical connection between her and the entire cat species; the stories she uses to support this assertion—e.g., being “invited” by a cat to a private cat party in rural Vermont—strain credulity. Gershon thoughtfully weaves the wacky cat-finding stories with stories about her past cats and significant people in her life. Though these anecdotes aren’t always fascinating, they are well-integrated into the story and give the thin premise of this book some needed heft.
Well organized but mostly frivolous and at times implausible.