This book shows the resilience of its author and the universal quest to belong at all costs., Teaching the Cat to Sit is about the most important thing of all: Unconditional love. For that, and for the great biography it is, Teaching the Cat to Sit is a must-read,especially for those who can relate., Powerful down to the last page. The book works because of its deliberateness and its ultimately empowering message of truth to self. Teaching the Cat to Sit makes us each reflect on our sense of humanity, our connection to religion, and our struggles to accept ourselves-and each other-as we are.ĭespite its inherent sadness, Teaching is hard to put down because author Michelle Theall is a first-rate storyteller.
Michelle writes with wry wit and bald honesty about her life, seamlessly weaving her past and her present into a touching commentary on all the love, pain, and redemption that families inspire.
In the end she realizes that in order to be a good mother, she may have to be a bad daughter. But when her four-year-old's Catholic school decides to expel all children of gay parents, Michelle tiptoes into a controversy that exposes her to long-buried shame, which leads to a public battle with the Church and a private one with her parents. Years later at age forty-two, Michelle has made delicate peace with her mother and is living her life openly with her partner of ten years and their adopted son in the liberal haven of Boulder, Colorado. Yet they both clung tightly to their devout Catholic faith-the unifying grace that all but shattered their relationship when Michelle finally admitted she was gay. She was often at odds with her volatile, overly dramatic, and depressed mother, who had strict ideas about how girls should act. Michelle grew up in the conservative Texas Bible Belt, bullied by her classmates and abandoned by her evangelical best friend before she'd ever even held a girl's hand. Even when society, friends, the legal system, and the Pope himself swing toward acceptance of the once unacceptable, Michelle Theall still waits for the one blessing that has always mattered to her the most: her mother's. Nuanced and poignant, heartrending and funny, Michelle Theall's thoughtful memoir is a universal story about our quest for unconditional love from our parents, our children, and most important, from ourselves. Nuanced and poignant, heartrending and funny, Michelle Theall's thoughtful memoir is a universal story about our quest for unconditional love from our parents, our children, and most importantly, from ourselves.
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