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Notes -
Actually, it's about ethics in literary journalism
Do you remember a short story called "Cat Person," which was published in 2017? It went viral and caused quite a stir at the time. It's a story that involves dating, sex, questionable consent, and an awkward age gap, so it's practically the perfect storm for inciting controversy at that time. But it's also just a well written and engaging story- I'd recommend reading it and forming your own thoughts if you haven't already.
The story is written in close third person, which gives the impression that we have a perfectly reliable narrative of what the main person is thinking and feeling, while the other characters don't matter so much. It invites us to feel sympathy and understanding for the main character as something adjacent to a rape victim. The male character starts off seeming normal but behaves worse and worse as the story goes on, leading to the ending where he sends her a string of angry text messages that end in the single word: "whore."
It's an intensely personal story, and told in a realistic style, so one can't help but wonder if it's about the author's own life. If so, is that really what happened, or is she perhaps twisting some details to make herself look better and her ex-boyfriend look worse?
The author, Kristen Roupenian, strongly denies this. They published this interview just a couple days after the story (did they already know it would blow up?) where she said among other things:
So no, it's not a true story, or at least not anyone she met in real life. It's mostly her venting at some online troll. She goes on to say that she actually felt more comfortable writing Robert's texts in the story because she's his age- she doesn't really know what it's like to be a 20 yr old college girl these days and has trouble imitating their texting style. But it's clearly meant to be a feminist story where we mostly have sympathy for the woman and very little for the man, evaporating to nothing at the end as he turns into a monster.
A year later, she published this follow-up: What It Felt Like When “Cat Person” Went Viral
This essay is auto-biographical. She explains that just getting her story published in the New Yorker was a huge break for her as a writer, and she was thoroughly unprepared for the amount of publicity it got. There was a huge response to the story, initially from feminists praising it, and then from (mostly) men criticizing it or defending the man in the story. It was taken as sort of a microcosm for all bad relationships between men and women in the modern era, particularly for short term sexual relationships. Everyone wanted to know more details about her own life and the "real" story, so that they could know more about how to judge it.
Except that, as she said... it's not real. She made it up. She's actually a 36-year-old lesbian woman with very little hetero dating experience. She spent her twenties doing the Peace Corp in Kenya, followed by a long graduate program studying African literature. Her own life is pretty much the polar opposite of the main character in the story.
I'm sympathetic to this perspective. As a writer, I would want my story to just stand on its own, without people trying to investigate and psychoanalyze every detail of my life. I strongly believe in 'Death of the Author," so it really shouldn't matter what the author did or thought when they were writing the story. It's a short story with many details missing, so you're free to imagine into it whatever you want. If you want to imagine it as a banner for why women need feminism to assert themselves more strongly, and why enthusiastic consent (not just nominal consent) is important, you can read it that way. Or you can read it the exact opposite way, for how a guy did absolutely nothing wrong except being slightly awkward and insufficiently attractive, so he then gets his feelings hurt and his reputation destroyed by the whims of a young woman who can't even say what he did wrong. All she has to do is cry, and she's got her entire friend group leaping to her defense, plus a huge outpouring of #metoo from everyone reading this story online.
So what I'd like to say is that it's just a good work of fiction, and you can leave the author out of it unless you want to buy her book.
Except... apparently it isn't a work of fiction after all
This came piece came out in 2021, 2 years after the follow-up reaction piece and almost 4 years after the original story. In this essay, a woman named Alexis Nowicki claims that "Cat Person" was actually inspired by something that happened to her. And not just "inspired" by, but with enough specific details matching that she had dozens of acquaintances contacting her to ask if she had written the story herself under a pen name.
Apparently she had been an 18-year-old in a relationship with a 33 year-old-man, living in the same town as the story and having their first date at the same movie theater, with a very similar communication style. Other than the age gap, it seems like they had a pretty typical relationship- awkward at first, dragging out over several months, then happy for a few months, then gradually breaking up. She was perfectly happy with their sex life, she was just happier living in a different city. They still kept in touch occasionally, and were amicable but not close.
She contacted him about the story, and he agreed it was very odd, an uncanny match to some of their own experiences. It also him a lot of angst and self-doubt, to see himself as the bad guy in the story. But they took it to be just some weird coincidence.
Three years later, she found out that he had suddenly died. It does not say how, just that it was "sudden." It doesn't exactly say suicide, but it also doesn't say it wasn't suicide, so I have strong suspicions.
After his death, this woman Alexis did some more investigation. She contacted a mutual acquaintenance (though apparently he wasn't close enough to know that this man had died). She asked him about the story, and he said that yes, it was true- this story was about her. Her ex-boyfriend and talked to the author of the story, and she based it on their relationship.
Some time later, this woman contacts the author of the story, and gets a response. The email says:
(apparently they also later had a phone conversation which she kept private)
When I read that, I felt outraged. I'm trying hard to be fair to the original story and author, to not give into angry-internet-male feelings of the eternal online gender war. But now by the author's own admission she:
The piece ends with some hand-wringing by the author about how "we are all unreliable narrators." So uh... maybe her own memories are all wrong, and the guy was actually was as bad as the fictional version of him? Maybe she was just too young and naive to notice that this guy she thought she liked was actually bad? Maybe some distant lesbian woman twice her age knows more about her own lived experience than she does? Despite all of her own memories, and evidence, and the testimonies of other people who all said what a genuinely good guy this man was... maybe the fictional version was more true because that's what resonated with other feminist readers' reactions?
No, screw that. I'm going back to my original gut reaction from when I first read it- this story is biased as hell, it's a feminist hit piece to smear all men, and it's just pure culture-war fodder. She started off with a true story for inspiration, but then deliberately changed all important details for maximum outrage. Sometimes things are just that simple.
Presuming that she's being honest in the quoted email, I'm not sure why you find yourself so outraged? Her lying about it in print is bad, but the lie was that it was purely fictional, which is a way of making the real guy appear more distant from the creepy asshole that is depicted in the fiction. Given that, I don't think she deserves any blame for whatever poor mental state that real guy might have gotten into. If this story made him do so, it was due to his choice to interpret the text in a way that was clearly against the stated and ostensible intention. Unfortunate for the guy, but if this author had used an RNG that, through sheer luck, happened to generate that exact same story, resulting in that guy falsely believing that he was being represented as a creepy asshole, the same thing would have happened.
Which, yeah. That's all it was, and, as someone who also subscribes to the Death of the Author, I believe that's pretty much all it could ever be. Whether or not the story is an accurate account of true things that actually happened or the fever dream of a feminist with a fetish for being oppressed (perhaps I repeat myself?) doesn't matter, it's the text that is presented that matters, because the text is what gets read and interpreted, not the thoughts or intentions of the author.
No, the lie is that she made him out to be something damn close to a rapist and stalker when he really wasn't at all. There are plenty of real life cases that might have been fit that kind of legally-nebulous situation, but this one seems to be completely innocent. If it was purely a fictional story it would be fine, but she left in enough real details that all of his real-life friends and family isntantly recognized him and started asking him if the story was about him. She essentially libeled him by calling him a rapist, and got away with "it's just fiction bro" as a legal fig leaf. This probably resultd in a lot of his friends and family turning against him.
I have no idea how you can draw that conclusion from reading the essay. Robert is depicted as awkward, occasionally boorish and inconsiderate, bad in bed and other miscellaneous unflattering features, but where on earth are you getting anything remotely rapist or stalker-adjacent? He brought a girl over of her own will, she got cold feet while he was stripping off his clothes, but she didn't say so. At no point did he pressure her, it was pure awkwardness on her part that kept her quiet. Barring the most partisan of gender warriors, nobody would consider that coercive.
He didn't even follow her around for Christ's sake, she ran into him by accident at a bar, where her friends overreacted and hustled her out like a Secret Service escort.
While I agree with you that no reasonable person would characterise Robert as a rapist, I'm curious if his actions would qualify as such under that absurd "affirmative consent" framework of a few years ago.
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Mostly good points, but my friend this is rape according to every sexual assault prevention training I’ve been to since 2012. The most partisan of gender warriors are in the room with us now, and they’re getting paid to tell people that.
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She did no such thing, though. She invented a fictional character who were those things, basing that fictional character and the fictional scenario largely on someone she met IRL. Any inference about actual reality and real humans living within it based on the text that she put down was something voluntarily done entirely by the reader. Especially since she lied in a way that pointed away from the real person she based the character on.
That's a big leap from the 1st sentence to the 2nd. I disagree that leaving in that many real details in a story that's explicitly presented as fiction is "essentially libel" with a "fig leaf." I think that's just an entirely normal, reasonable thing for any fiction writer to do, and any harm that might have come the way of the real person that the fictional character was inspired by is entirely the fault of whoever read the fictional story and jumped to conclusions about reality. Certainly, it's possible that this author was playing some 4D chess to libel this innocent man via plausibly deniable means? It's just not in evidence, and all she appears to be certainly guilty of is fictionalize some IRL story she heard in a salacious/provocative way that was particularly in vogue at the time. Perhaps that deserves condemnation for the worst of all crimes, poor taste. But for harming that guy's life or mental health or theoretically turning his friends against him? She deserves no blame, no responsibility.
Yes, that's something done by the reader, but that doesn't mean she has no responsibility--she wrote things in such a way that how the readers would interpret it was completely predictable.
If she didn't do it on purpose, she was reckless enough that she bears pretty much the same moral responsibility as if she did it on purpose.
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