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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.
But this is what writers do. They use everyone and everything in their lives as raw material. It's long been a complaint! Some do it consciously, some do it unconsciously, but if a writer hears a good story or something that strikes them as interesting, it all goes into the little filing cabinet of the imagination to be re-arranged and turned into a story later. They even write about how they do this!
I think the author is honest, as far as it goes, that she didn't write a direct "this is the story of Jack and Jill, only the names have been changed". She took the base story, mixed it with her own experiences, and translated it into a short story. That people then come along later and say "This was based on our true story" is not evidence she is deliberately lying.
Plus, there are always people eager to find out "but what is the real story behind this?" especially when it's this kind of sudden successful tale that is irresistible to imagine must be based on "this is Jack and she is Jill". And people do find parallels between "hey this happened to me and that event is in this story, so it must be about me!" even in cases where this is not so. There have been examples where authors wrote about George Fotheringham and then a real George Fotheringham turns up and says "all my neighbours think this is based on me, please change this". (That helped explain to me why some character names in early 20th century fiction were so unrealistic; you can't just write about Bill Shaw the villain of your murder mystery for fear of a real Bill Shaw popping up to sue you for libel, so he has to be Porteus Manglefig instead).
I'd argue there are degrees to which that's normal and appropriate, and this goes too far. It's one thing to base a story or fictional character on a real person. Usually if it's not a public figure they'll change some details so it's not recognizable though, and try not to drag someone through the mud. In this case, she left all the trivial details identical so that all of their real-life acquaintances easily recognized them, but then also changed his character to be unrecognizable. She's basically giving everyone who knows this guy in real life that he's a rapist, or something damn close (creepy, awkward, and bad at sex), when he was nothing like that in real life. There's simply no reason to use a real person for that character- why not invent an actual fictional person if you're going to make up the story anyway? At this point it's pretty much libel.
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