Review: My Beloved Monster: Masha, the Half-Wild Rescue Cat Who Rescued Me

I’ve read a lot of memoirs about cats over the years. Some are cute, some are moving, some are thought-provoking. I’ve enjoyed most of them. But no other book has touched me as deeply as Caleb Carr’s My Beloved Monster: Masha, the Half-wild Rescue Cat Who Rescued Me.

Caleb Carr grew up in a dysfunctional  home with an abusive father. He found comfort in the feline companions that were part of his childhood. Even as an adult, his relationships with cats outlasted most of his human ones.

After Caleb built a home in upstate New York, Masha, a Siberian Forest Cat who was abandoned as a kitten, came into his life. He met her at a shelter where she was passed over for adoption again and again because of her wild nature. Much to the shelter staff’s amazement, Masha became a different cat with Caleb. She clearly chose him, and he took her home the same day. From that day on, for the next seventeen years, the two became inseparable.

Caleb and Masha formed a bond that went beyond anything I’ve ever encountered, both in literature and real life. When Caleb’s health deteriorated, Masha knew how to comfort him. When Masha hurt or dealt with her own health issues, Caleb helped her. A lifetime of studying feline behavior and his experience with previous cats combined to allow him to communicate with Masha on a level rarely seen between cat and human.

Caleb allowed Masha to go outside. I’m a firm proponent of keeping cats indoors, but in this case, there’s no question in my mind that this was the right decision for Masha. “Masha was an entirely different kind of feline,” he writes, and keeping her inside “would have killed her just as certainly as any bear or dog.” This wild girl thrived in the great outdoors,  and frequently got herself in trouble, but she always came out ahead and always returned to Caleb. She even took on a bear (yes, you read that right) on Caleb’s wooded property.

Both Caleb and Masha struggled with multiple health issues. There was a certain synchronicity between their health journeys that only intensified the bond between them. There were only a few nights when Caleb had to be hospitalized that the two were apart, and “coming back from a hospital or a medical facility to Masha was always particularly heartening,” Carr writes, “not just because she’d been worried and was glad to see me, but because she seemed to know exactly what had been going on … and also because she was so anxious to show that she hadn’t been scared, that she’d held the fort bravely.”

Caleb’s biggest concern was he would die before Masha, but he also worried that he wouldn’t survive it if Masha went first. In one of the many beautiful passages in the book, he writes: “In each other’s company, nothing seemed insurmountable. We were left with outward scars. … But the only wounds that really mattered to either of us were the psychic wounds caused by the occasional possibility of losing each other; and those did heal, always, blending and dissolving back into joy.”

This is one of the most powerful books I ever read, but it’s not for the faint of heart. It takes you on a deeply emotional, sometimes extremely painful journey. I cried plenty of times throughout the book, and toward the end, I found myself sobbing. But oh, it was worth every single tear.

“We had a great and wild life in this reality,” Caleb writes at the end of the book. “I can only imagine what we will achieve when freed of the mortal struggled that marked our time here.There, we will finally walk and run side by side, to face and conquer whatever comes.”

Ultimately, this book is a story of love and grief unlike anything I’ve encountered before. It will make you look at your own relationships with your cats, both past and present, in a new way. And it will stay with you long after you turn the final page.

If you’re only going to read one cat memoir this year, make it My Beloved Monster.

My Beloved Monster is available from Amazon.

The book came out in April of this year, a month before Caleb’s death. The interview in the video below was filmed shortly before his passing.

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