Befriending Betsy Excerpt

For readers who loved Marley & Me, a poignant memoir about cats, dogs, and what it means to forge a friendship—in life and in death—with a person you can never meet.

Betsy Pauly died five years before Jen Braaksma knew she had even lived. Betsy was an artist and writer hailing from Minnesota, Texas, Missouri, and Florida. Jen is an author and book coach from Ottawa, Canada. Yet, improbably, Betsy became Jen’s friend.

When Betsy died, she left behind a heartbroken husband, a hole in the hearts of her family and friends, and a half-finished manuscript. To honor his wife, Chips wanted to publish her animal stories—Betsy was a dedicated animal welfare advocate who could never say no to a stray dog or cat (or dozens!).

Turning manuscripts around is Jen’s job. But as she worked, she never expected to form a friendship with the woman on the page. How was that even possible? Readers might feel they “know” an author by their writing, but Jen’s experience went further. She got to see Betsy’s drafts and her process. She got to see Betsy’s mind. And in doing so, she got to know this extraordinary woman. This may be Jen’s journey, but it’s Betsy’s story. A story about dedication, passion, and the connection that comes from sharing your authentic self—even between two people who can never meet.

Befriending Betsy Excerpt

Jen Braaksma 

Introduction

On Betsy Pauly’s gravestone is an inscription. “Sure Had Fun.” And another: “Spay Your Pets.”

I haven’t seen it myself, at least not in person, though Betsy’s husband, Chips, sent me photos. But the minute I saw the pictures, I immediately knew how Betsy the engravings were. 

Yet I’ve never met her. I can never meet her. She died five years before I even knew she’d been alive. In an alternate world where she had lived, I suspect we never would have crossed paths. She was American; I’m Canadian. She was fifty-eight when she died; that would have made me forty-four. She was a visual artist; I cannot draw stick figures to save my life. But she was also a writer, and now we had something in common. Writing, then, is what drew us together.

Writing, then, bridged the gap between life and death. 

Decades ago, when I was in journalism school, I read an old profile of Ernest Hemingway. The reporter had accompanied the literary icon as he went shopping for a coat. I was fascinated “watching” this famous author carry out something as ordinary and mundane as buying clothes—and even more so intrigued at the experience of the reporter who got to accompany him. Hemingway came to life on the page in a fundamentally different way than the life he breathed into his stories. If I hadn’t been before, I most certainly was then, a believer in the power of a narrative to help us understand others. Biographies, memoirs, anecdotes, interviews, they were all media privileging us with glimpses of the inner lives of those we could otherwise never know. 

But many of those stories that I admired over the years hinged on one of two things: another person let us into the subject’s world, like the journalist who followed Hemingway on his errands or the subject themselves crafted their stories in ways they controlled. 

With Betsy, I could do neither. I could not interview her; no coat-shopping for the two of us, and while she had a draft of a manuscript, it wasn’t a memoir. She had stories to tell, but they weren’t specifically designed by her to purposely reveal her true self. She was an animal welfare advocate, and believed strongly in caring for creatures who could not care for themselves. She had a ton of crazy, wild, silly, heartbreaking, heartwarming animal stories and wanted to jot them down—but even the stories themselves weren’t originally her idea. 

Mother told me to write a book about my cats, Betsy writes in the introduction to her first draft. After my allergic reaction to such advice wore off, I had to admit it was a pretty good idea, seeing as I presided over a pet-heavy household. I’d always had a hankering to write the right idea, some earthshaking tell to tell, and I recalled the familiar landscapes of my feline-filled world. Goldilocks and the Thirteen Sofa Shredders. Snow White keeps collecting really hairy dwarves. I had a crazy quilt of patchwork pussycat stories. 

Betsy’s focus was on the cats she owned, the cats she adopted, the cats she fostered, and a good number of dogs, too. She was clear to address her intended reader: cat people. She warns away the rest. The charm of these flighty anarchists might fall a paw short for you unfortunate folks who’ve never savored the highly addictive taste for Tabby, either by innocent omission or purposeful avoidance. 

As such, Betsy’s intent with her writing was never to navel-gaze. She had not ventured into her project with the express idea to “tell her story.” She wanted to tell her cats’ stories. And dogs’. There’s also a cantankerous goose, blind, one-footed pigeons, and raccoons who make cameos, but Betsy’s main event was cats, cats, cats. Not herself. 

Yet scholars and authors dig for understanding of the deceased all the time. They read old letters, papers, manuscript drafts, and other treasures in passionate efforts to unearth their subject and bring them back to life. Shakespeare, for example, cannot be interviewed, yet one can drown in the vast quantities of pages written about him in the last four hundred-plus years. Even Sappho, the famous Greek lyric poetess, has contemporary scholars scouring her writing 2,500 years later—and with only 650 lines of her estimated 10,000 lines of poetry remaining. 

So why, then, was I surprised when I read Betsy’s draft of her animal stories? Chips had found me because he wanted help getting Betsy’s writing out into the world as an honor to his late wife. I’d reworked plenty of manuscripts in the past—part of my job as a book coach, editor, and ghostwriter, though I admit until now, I’d always had access to the writer themselves. Still, it was not new to discover that a writer’s prose could reveal the writer herself to her reader. Yet still, I could not understand why I could not shake Betsy—not just her cats—from my head. What was it about her draft, her work, her stories that made me feel not just that I was reading about her experiences, not just that I was reading about her, but that I was meeting her? How had she made me feel, simply by reading her work, that I was already her friend? 

I had to find out. 

 

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Category: Contemporary Women Writers