A riotous and raunchy novel about a woman whose search for Romy Haag, one of David Bowie's former lovers, is sidelined when she falls into a deep obsession with a musician, who is often compared to Bowie, in pursuit of stardom
“ Lean Cat, Savage Cat is the book that’ s been missing from my reading habits: classically glamourous, timelessly seductive. Lauren J. Joseph is a wit and an assassin from one sentence to the next” — Torrey Peters, author of Detransition, Baby
Alone at a party, sipping her celery sour, Charli knows she’ s in a rut. Kicking around with the rest of London’ s bohemian dropouts, she has no idea what to do with her arts degree and her research project on Romy Haag— the transsexual disco singer and long-time lover of David Bowie— has all but stalled out. But her life takes a turn when she bumps into the mysterious Alexander Geist. Androgynously, glamorously handsome, he feels something like a soul mate, another love once lost and now found. Naturally, when he leaves for Berlin, Charli follows.
There, at the center of the city’ s febrile party scene, Charli and Alexander embark on their great project: turn Alexander into the greatest pop star since David Bowie. But Alexander is elusive, mercurial; Charli is in over her head before she realizes just how self-destructive her life has become under his spell.
Lean Cat, Savage Cat is Isherwood one-hundred years on, it's Nancy Mitford in the dark room, Bret Easton-Ellis amongst a raft of European low-lives scrabbling for success. It is the story of setting out in search of one thing and finding yourself in possession of something quite different, a book about obsession and excess, doppelgä ngers and disassociation, fame and fandom, the tyrannical return of unprocessed grief, and the terrible things we do to feel loved.
