The New Statesman, which each year asks writers and guests to select a favorite read from the preceding 12 months, published their 2024 selections last week, and My Beloved Monster was among those picked. To justify the choice, John Gray wrote:
Caleb Carr’s My Beloved Monster (Allen Lane), an account of the life he shared for 17 years with a Siberian forest cat, is a profound story of mortality, grief and love. Left to die in a locked apartment, Masha was found by Carr in an animal sanctuary, where she adopted him as much as he adopted her. Abused as a child by his violent father and suffering poor health for the rest of his life, he formed a more enduring relationship with her than with any human being. While he was writing in the remote farmhouse they shared in upstate New York, she was “hunting and defending our territory” and comforting him in his illnesses. When she died of cancer Carr was desolated, and died himself, also from cancer, not long after. My Beloved Monster will be compared with JR Ackerley’s classic My Dog Tulip (1956), but to my mind Carr tells a more extraordinary tale. Unlike Ackerley’s Alsatian, Masha remained untamed, befriending an ailing human without ever giving up her wild nature.
The selection coincided with the UK release of My Beloved Monster in late October by Allen Lane. Already a New York Times bestseller from its earlier US publication in April, it has garnered lovely reviews from across the Atlantic as well.
Reviewing for The Times, Francesca Angelini called the memoir “a warm, heavy love letter to Masha and her feline predecessors,” while Kathryn Hughes, reviewing for The Guardian, described the memoir as “one of the finest meditations on animal companionship that I have ever read.” Hughes explained:
In this exquisite book novelist Caleb Carr tells the story of the “shared existence” he enjoyed for 17 years with his beloved cat, Masha. At the time of writing she is gone, he is going, and all that remains is to explain how they made each other’s difficult lives bearable. The result is not just a lyrical double biography of man and cat but a wider philosophical inquiry into our moral failures towards a species which, cute internet memes notwithstanding, continues to get a raw deal.
For those who may have missed them, you can find Caleb Carr’s interviews about My Beloved Monster given late last year here.
And if you have not yet met the remarkable Masha, like the reviewers above I recommend giving Caleb’s final, heartfelt memoir a try. Whether you are a cat aficionado or not, My Beloved Monster is a moving tribute to both Masha and her human companion of 17 years, and provides a glimpse the kind of deeply loving relationship possible between feline and human, if only more humans would give them a chance to come that close.
