He seems to have developed his extraordinary, cat-like equilibrium after being struck by lightning as a child: "It was like some of that lightning must've stayed in me," he says.
Her love and interest in cats was illustrated in her book Extraordinary Cats, published in 1967.
There are also horses and birds and an extraordinary acrobatic cat act (they really do always fall on their feet).
In one particularly extraordinary case, a cat named Oscar at a Rhode Island nursing home predicted the deaths of close to 50 elderly individuals by planting himself on their beds just hours before they died.
He is a son of the extraordinary sire Storm Cat and he is owned by racing aristocrats: Bob and Beverly Lewis, Susan Magnier and Michael Tabor.
That's only part of it: there's Céline's slapdash magic act as La Mandragore, Julie's manic song-and-dance debut as La Kamikaze, a dead-of-night library raid with roller-skates and an extraordinary number of cats.
These largest of Africa's small cats are extraordinary acrobats, capable of leaping 3m into the air and taking out multiple birds with one swipe.
Like another entry in this genre, David Dosa's best-selling "Making Rounds With Oscar: The Extraordinary Gift of an Ordinary Cat," you've taken advantage of our fondness for companion animals to induce us to consider subjects we ordinarily avoid.
The material revealed a woman who was both ordinary and extraordinary: writing poems about her cat, her friends, her grand mother, the wind; but also, from a strikingly young age, engaging passionately with the world, trying to find her place in it.
In its qualified state, it would indicate someone garnering critical acclaim for said rendering, as in: "That really was an extraordinary rendition of Memory from Cats".
