People often ask, through kind yet indirect lines of questioning, how I turned out this way. It usually happens after I drop some lore about attending Bush rallies or Sean Hannity Freedom Concerts as a child. I respond with something cheeky (“troll dolls and Tumblr!”) or vague (“literacy”).
But in truth, it comes down to these two books:
Oh, did you think this was going to be about Hello Kitty? Fake Sanriohead behavior. Real ones know Hello Kitty is canonically a friend, not a cat.
More than any other media, The Cookie-Store Cat and Kitty’s New Doll made me the “militant radical leftist”1 I am today. Here is how.
The Cookie-Store Cat by Cynthia Rylant is a found family story about a benevolent queer throuple and their adopted child.
The three bakers could be a father and his sons, I guess. Rylant leaves it open-ended. I copped this at the Scholastic book fair in kindergarten because the cover really did something for my brain chemistry.
Little did I know the book itself would alter it irrevocably.
First off, The Cookie-Store Cat has no plot. People love to say a book “has no plot” when they mean the plot is boring or not high-stakes enough. But this book is an absolute plot vacuum. Our zaftig protagonist and his bi fathers are completely unbothered by the demands of linear narrative convention. The story, if you can call it that, goes like this:
In a void, we meet the titular cat. He simply is.
Brief flashback to the initial finding of the cat.
Overview of the family’s routine (“morning hellos,” making cookies, complimenting the cat, performing various good deeds).
Christmas interlude? Idk it just talks about what happens every Christmas for a couple pages. This book exists mostly outside of time. It feels like we’re dropping in on random days throughout the year, yet the whole is presented as a rough progression throughout a single abstracted day.
Compliments and good deeds, cont’d.
I remember a lot of children’s books at the time being like “what if you had to make a WACKY SALAD for MOTHER?” or “what if your TEACHER was an ORC?” Yet The Cookie-Store Cat says hmm, no, what if you were operating in a nonhierarchical community of care?
As corny Lin Manuel boots as it sounds, the main action in The Cookie-Store Cat is giving and receiving love. The bakers donate cookies, split household labor, and offer the cat thoughtful affirmations. The cat greets people, listens, and gets cuddles. We’re obsessed with home and belonging here, two things you get the feeling the protagonists have shaped into existence over the course of years through the small actions they repeat every day. Snacks, stretches, resource sharing, sleep, friends. You could 100% reformat this and pass it off as a twee chapbook.
The side-vibe (which is like a subplot when there is no plot) is living deliciously.2 Cream and kisses every day, baby. The characters deny themselves nothing, which isn’t a problem because they don’t seem to want much.
Then there’s the art style. This book looks like it was illustrated with royal icing. No sharp lines or dark edges. Everyone is puddled onto the scene, and all of it is decidedly imperfect. The page layouts prioritize trimmings, borders, and floods of solid color, but in a restrained way. Like we’re decorating cookies and don’t want to overdo it.
There are also like, no white people, which is cool.
The book ends with a handful of recipes. It’s strange that such a sedate little story ends with seven specific calls to action. But the imperative here to make your life delicious through what you consistently do wedged itself into my frontal lobe.
Go make these fucking cookies, Rylant says! LOVE IS A DOING WORD!
Listen, you see this cover, and you know the system’s coming down.
The book revolves around Kitty, a proud Luddite in stunner mary janes, resisting the gaping maw of more more more and standing firm in the power of creativity and directorial vision. Whereas The Cookie-Store Cat is a zen koan, Kitty’s New Doll is a punk zine on how to disable Waymos. There’s plenty of plot here, folks, and the plot is sticking it to the man and using your goddamn brain.
The book follows Kitty and her mom to the toy store, where Kitty is allowed to pick out one new toy. From all sides, the betreacled walls of late-stage capitalism press inward.
Society/her bourgeois mother is like, Kitty, get one of these overengineered robot dolls! This one pisses. This one’s a cop. This one’s got AI. Get the banananano doll, Kitty. Do it.
But our intrepid Kitty says THAT DOES NOT RESONATE WITH ME! and picks the most basic and unassuming doll in the establishment. Small. Poor. Bald. Unemployed. No bones.
It blows people’s minds.
Kitty has a plan and acts on it. She channels her rich inner world into this low-tech new friend rather than accepting the confines of commodifiable functions. She could not care less about your soldier doll and his capabilities. She can think anything she wants into being, and she knows it. What do you mean “a plain old rag doll that can’t do anything at all?” Have you not heard of imagination?
Kitty is that girl, and her play style is unmatched.
When I first encountered this book, I had never given a second thought to my preferred toys, though a perennial favorite was a chunk of pewter I kept in a drawstring bag with three Barbie shoes. So you can see how this book filled me with a righteous indignation I had never before experienced as people challenged Kitty’s clearly superior choice in dolls. And how triumphant I felt in the end when her mother sits down and pays up.
In a world that wants us more spoon-fed and overwhelmed than ever, I try to channel Kitty every time I embrace artistic delusion or have a good sit ‘n’ think that leaves my brain sweaty.
Or anytime I encounter an eBay listing for a ran-thru bootleg toy.
quote from a relative’s 600-word post about me on reddit
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