Good Luck Cat: How a Cat Saved a Family, and a Family Saved a Cat

Lissa Warren’s father needed a retirement companion while his wife and daughter were at work. Enter Ting, a seven-pound Korat who changed his life, and the life of the family. All kittens are mischievous, but Ting “the cat grenade” was real trouble. She was also smart, endearing, and the soul of the Warren family.

     In late 2008, Lissa’s father died of a heart attack. The images from that night still haunt her—especially the EKG readout ending in one long, devastating em dash. Less than a year later, Lissa and her mother stared at another EKG readout, this time for Ting. A living feline extension of the man they missed so much—the man they had tried, but failed, to save—she was diagnosed with a potentially fatal heart condition. The only option was to have a human pacemaker implanted in the cat—a procedure even the best animal hospital in Boston hadn’t performed in a decade. Determined not to lose another family member, they embarked on a medical odyssey on behalf of the gray cat who had been her father’s shadow—a journey that would prepare one of them for her own serious diagnosis.

   A gorgeously written memoir about grief, hope, and how pets both complicate and enrich our lives, The Good Luck Cat is a testament to the power of the human—and the feline—spirit. 

At age twenty-four, Lissa Warren was named Publicity Director at David R. Godine, Publisher—a small but respected literary press in Boston. She went on to work in the publicity department of Houghton Mifflin before becoming Director of Publicity at Boston’s Perseus Publishing where she worked for three years before being promoted to Senior Director of Publicity at their sister company, Da Capo Press. Ms. Warren is the author of The Savvy Author’s Guide to Book Publicity: A Comprehensive Resource—From Building the Buzz to Pitching the Press and holds a B.S. in English Education from Miami University and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Bennington College. Her poetry has appeared in such publications as Quarterly West, Oxford Magazine, Black Warrior Review, and Verse, and she serves as a Poetry Editor for the literary magazine Post Road. Since 2003, Ms. Warren has been an Adjunct Professor at Boston’s Emerson College, teaching graduate and undergraduate courses in Book Editing, Book Publicity, and Book Publishing as part of their Writing, Literature, and Publishing program. She also serves on the advisory council of Southern New Hampshire University’s M.F.A. writing program. In 2007, she became one of the first faculty members in Boston University’s publishing certificate program. She blogs about publishing for the Huffington Post, and has spoken about publishing for the Virginia Festival of the Book, Lesley University, New York University, Publishers Marketing Association, the American Society of Journalists and Authors, Publishers Association of the South, BookBuilders of Boston, the Romance Writer’s Association of New England, ForeWord magazine, Grub Street, the New Hampshire Writers’ Project, the Cape Cod Writers Conference, the Concord Festival of Books, the Adirondack Writer’s Conference, the Compleat Biographer Conference, and Harvard University’s Nieman Conference, among others. She lives in Salem, New Hampshire.