Making The Cat Laugh

One woman's journal of single life on the margins.

Published February 2010

Available at all good bookshops including:

Amazon, Waterstones

A brilliant collection of Lynne Truss’ journalism – recording the life of a metropolitan refugee from coupledom. The alternative ‘Bridget Jones’.

For seven long years, starting in ‘The Listener’ in 1988 and continuing in ‘The Times’ and ‘Woman’s Journal’, Lynne Truss has been trying to make her cat laugh. It has been an uphill task, which is why she deserves this book, a recognition of outstanding courage in the face of futility. Along the way, ‘Margins’, ‘Single of Life’ and ‘One Woman’s Journal’ have collected a band of devoted fans, yet still the cat remains unimpressed.

Never have so many jokes about Kitbits been found in such concentration as in ‘Making the Cat Laugh’. But under the headings such as ‘The Single Woman Considers Going Out but Doesn’t Fancy the Hassle’ and ‘The Single Woman Stays at Home and Goes Quietly Mad’, we discover a writer not only obsessed with cats, but prone to over-reacting generally – to news stories, shopping, passive smoking, Christmas, coupledom, boyfriends, snails, sheds, Andre Agassi, cooking instructions, requests of ‘How’s the novel going?’ and personal remarks of any kind.

A Few Words From Lynne

Making the Cat Laugh, first published in 1995, is a collection of columns from The Listener, The Times and Woman’s Journal. By contrast with Eats, Shoots & Leaves, this book had quite abysmal timing. They now deny this, but my publishers did argue with me when I suggested, in 1995, that there might be quite a big market for funny books about single women in their thirties. Oh well. Making the Cat Laugh was published in a low-key way, sold out quickly and that was that. And a year or so later, along came the wonderful Bridget Jones, with the result that, for the next ten years, any funny book by a woman that wasn’t about a single woman in her thirties (such as my own Going Loco) was seen to be insanely out of step, and was marketed as chick-lit regardless.

I hasten to say that there is no comparison in regard to subject matter between Bridget Jones’s Diary and Making the Cat Laugh. The humour of the books is different, as is the focus of the agony. While Bridget Jones suffers to get the course of romance to run smooth, I make half-baked attempts at self-amusement, and the only love interest is Buster the cat. I wrote most of these columns in a surge of white-hot energy after my father died (suddenly) and my boyfriend moved out (not before time), and the last thing on my mind was finding a partner: I was much more interested in the mechanics of survival. I revelled in singledom. I embraced it. I was excited by it. And the cats just had to put up with it.

By the way, I used to assure people that “there isn’t too much about cats in Making the Cat Laugh, but when I looked at it properly again I was forced to admit that cats are, well, something of a running theme. This tendency did not go unnoticed when they first appeared in the newspaper, either. When I was writing my column in The Times, Private Eye ran a little squib “The Times 40 Million Years Ago” which included two or three other columnists who had evidently outstayed their welcome, writing the same old stuff even in the Ice Age, and it included “Lynne Truss: How My Sabre-Toothed Tiger is Coping”.

I was just about to write that, unusually, no fabulous actor had recorded this for BBC Audio, unabridged, when I remembered something quite important: I did it myself.

NB – BBC audio for this book is a library edition only

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

The Irish Times on Making The Cat Laugh
Lynne Truss is a social humorist of sharp insight and startling candour.

Scotland on Sunday on Making The Cat Laugh
A small masterpiece of comedy…with abundant close observation, the familiar is made fresh…A continual hoot.

The Times on Making The Cat Laugh