We Need to Talk About Kevin: My Favorite Cat Is a Sociopath

This week, as we near the end of 2025, the writers and editors of KQED Arts & Culture are reflecting on One Beautiful Thing from the year.

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here’s a phrase we use in my house when it looks like things aren’t going our way: “Put it on the stairs.”

These four words stem from a visit I made to City Lights bookstore a few years ago to drop off zines based on my KQED series, Rebel Girls From Bay Area History. After discovering that City Lights no longer had zine shelves, I asked an employee where I could leave mine. When he told me to “put them on the stairs” to the poetry room, I very nearly didn’t. Off in the quietest corner of the bustling bookstore, I was convinced that no one would ever find them there. I half-heartedly left a half-stack, and went grumbling on my way.

What I hadn’t realized is that the stairs to the poetry room are also the stairs to the publisher’s office. Putting the zines on the stairs resulted in City Lights contacting me the following week and asking if I’d be interested in turning Rebel Girls into a book. City Lights will release that collection, Unsung Heroines: 35 Women Who Changed the Bay Area, in April 2026.

Ever since, when my boyfriend and I say “Put it on the stairs,” we’re reminding each other that momentary disappointments can sometimes lead to opportunities we never saw coming.

We spent a good portion of our summer with a recurring disappointment so panic-inducing, however, we completely forgot to remind each other to put it on the stairs. That disappointment? A seemingly possessed cat we were terrified of getting permanently stuck with.

I named him Kevin, after the murderous teenage boy from Lionel Shriver’s disturbing novel, We Need to Talk About Kevin. “If you were a human,” I told Kevin in a baby voice every time he inflicted a new injury on me, “you’d grow up to be a school shooter, yes you would!”

We did not invite Kevin into our home on purpose. Earlier this year, we took it upon ourselves to take in a pregnant street cat, after seeing her alone for weeks and rapidly increasing in size. A few days after arriving, Susan birthed seven kittens in my closet and we proceeded to do all we could to nurture and socialize her babies.

Once they were old enough, we went about getting the kittens into homes with friends and coworkers. Adopters came and went and took away their picks of the litter. Despite our best efforts to present Kevin as a fun addition to anyone’s family, no one was fooled. He was patently chaos in cat form. As five of his sisters and brothers went off to new homes, Kevin stayed with us, perpetually unchosen, and never not screaming at us for more food.

We came close to getting rid of Kevin three times. He was picked by one 12-year-old boy, who was quickly redirected to another (calmer) kitten by his parents. A friend of a friend hit me up online and said she’d happily add Kevin to her brood of three cats and six foster kittens — then backed out the day before she was supposed to pick him up. After that, Kevin went to someone’s home for a three-day trial period. This lovely woman elicited warm purrs from him easily, which gave me high hopes. If only Kevin didn’t have a penchant for climbing bare legs with his extended claws, that one might have worked out.

We tried so very hard to get rid of him.

As Kevin grew into a bigger cat, we knew his chances of adoption were getting slimmer. It didn’t help that once his legs got longer he started walking with the gait of John Wayne. We had decided early on to keep his mother and one of his well-behaved little sisters. As time ticked along, we panicked daily about the fact that we might get stuck with three cats, one of whom may be a minion of the Antichrist.

That was months ago now and Kevin is, of course, still with us. It got to the point where it would have been cruel to break up the deep bond he shares with his sister. Kevin is still the strangest cat I’ve ever met. But Kevin is, despite all of my best efforts, unequivocally mine.

Our attachment to one another formed slowly. It started with Kevin figuring out that making me bleed every 10 minutes wasn’t something I enjoyed very much. (Now he only does it twice a week!) Then he surmised that indulging in daily cuddlefests (during which he places his paws gently on my face) makes us both very happy indeed.

I started to appreciate his quirks. Like, he is absolutely terrified of the heating and screams continually when it’s on. He only plays with dog toys and food containers. He knows how to remove his own collar and does so with a “Ta da!” expression on his face. (He has lost or destroyed nine collars in five months.) Every time I tell him I love him, he bites my face. After I risked life and limb rescuing him from the massive tree in our yard, he immediately climbed onto the roof and just … stared at me.

For some reason, I love all of this.

So much so, I now believe that Kevin was the entire reason fate plopped a giant pregnant cat onto our doorstep in the first place. After failing at every turn to consider that something positive might ever come out of Kevin being so unadoptable, he is, by far, my favorite thing from 2025. I also realize now that life would have been infinitely easier for those months of desperate, failed re-homings if we had just sat back and accepted that fate was going to do its thing, no matter what we did.

As this fraught year draws to a close, I want Kevin to be a pertinent reminder to us all that the little things bumming us out today might just lead to the things that make us happiest tomorrow. Start putting all those everyday stresses on the stairs. You never know where that might lead in 2026.