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I just read about a real life version of the "isn't there someone you forgot to ask?" meme. Woman finds out a guy in his 30s dated a girl 13 years younger. She writes a story with their details, except in her story the guy is a creep. And now they're making a movie based on the story.
This is the short story: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/12/11/cat-person
This is the movie trailer: https://youtube.com/watch?v=J2VukOLSxoY
And this is an essay where the girl in the relationship says the guy was great: https://slate.com/human-interest/2021/07/cat-person-kristen-roupenian-viral-story-about-me.html
Alexis, a senior in high school, briefly worked with Charles at a restaurant. She was a hostess and he was a waiter. They liked each other and texted a lot. They slowly started dating. He was the liberal type who wouldn't own a car because it was bad for the environment. He even asked for consent before he kissed her for the first time. She said he was very gentle and caring and they had lots of things in common.
The only downside of the relationship was the fact that she felt people judged her for it, and that she felt she was growing up too fast by being in love with someone so old. They eventually grew apart and broke up when she was a sophomore in college, after dating for 2 years.
A few years later, Kristen Roupenian has an "encounter" with this Charles, after which she finds out that he dated someone much younger than him. She decides to write a story that includes personal details about him and the girl, including their small hometowns, places they worked at, the place they had their first date at, the way the guy dressed and a description of his house. Except in her story the guy is a creep, bad at sex, a liar and manipulator, who becomes abusive when the girl breaks up with him.
The story goes viral during the metoo movement. Alexis and Charles find out and are weirded out. Alexis thinks the author couldn't have known so many details about her life without stalking her online. Charles said he started questioning whether he was really an asshole and would go through old texts to make sure that was not the case.
A few years later, Alexis finds out Charles died. No cause of death is mentioned, other than the fact that it was unexpected. Earlier in the essay she says he was on antidepressants, so suicide is a possibility in my opinion.
Alexis tries to contact Kristen and she responds via email with a half-assed apology in which she says she shouldn't have included some of the details. Alexis writes this essay to tell her side of the story, but it doesn't change much.
And now they are making a movie based on this story.
Also, these are the pictures of the women mentioned in this post. I will let you figure out who's who.
https://imgur.com/2gApE3K
https://imgur.com/l2cfZtd
I always found the decision to write the Slate article rather weird. It felt like grabbing the spotlight for herself. If I were her*, if the story features the guy as a creep, then it clearly isn't my story. After all, he wasn't a creep. It's a weird reflex insecure people carry to show their whole ass under broad accusations, like people getting upset at someone being called dumb or ugly because it is mean to dumb or ugly people, as though anyone who isn't wildly insecure would group themselves under the categories "dumb" or "ugly."
In the final analysis it's a fairly innocuous story structure, the kind of thing that happens every day on every college campus across the country. While certain details made it identifiable to those close with Nowicki, Roupenien did change many details; Nowicki's argument is that Roupenien did not change enough of them. The interesting thing about the story is the internal monologue of the hypo-agentic and anhedonic protagonist, not any particular plot point lifted from Nowicki's life or not, which most anyone would understand bore only a vague similarity to any real person. She could easily have said to the handful of people who would have identified her "Hey that's not how I remember it, I've never even met this writer" and moved on with her life. Instead she chose to make the whole incident the first Google result under her name, taking it to the whole public, not just to those who knew her then and remembered these details, but to everyone she would meet in the future. That's an...odd...response to the supposed invasion of your privacy. Taking what would have been a private fun fact and making it into the first thing any new employer, romantic partner, etc will learn about you.
To me it is perfectly legitimate to write a story like Cat Person, in which you hear about a scenario and then imagine how you would feel if you were in that scenario. I'd imagine that is one of the most common ways that authors create stories, they hear about a scenario and then they insert themselves into it, how would I feel how would I react what would have made me do something like that. From Lord of the Flies to For Whom the Bell Tolls to The Killer Angels. It's.a long tradition. Jean Ross' Family still takes the time to critique the classic musical Cabaret every time there is a big production of it, "Our Grandmother Wasn't a Whore!" is always good for one or two headlines in a few midwit newspapers; the controversy is the primary reason anyone ever talks about Jean Ross anymore, which lead me to read more about her fascinating life. Seizing the controversy for oneself is seizing a slice of fame from a great work for oneself.
For what it's worth, regardless of the (dead) author's or most people's interpretation of Cat Person, I found it a very strong and interesting work of fiction. Not so much as a critique of men along the lines of "the guy was a creep all along" or whatever, but as a critique of the female protagonist's mindset. The way she drifts in and out of wanting to be involved in any of this, but lets herself get swept along for lack of any better ideas, the way she gets distanced from her friends and peer group by her relationship with this older man, is a genuine warning to girls. The kind of warning my mother gave to both me and my sister when we reached early teenage years: Never Go On A Mercy Date. Don't date people who you aren't super into. If you end up doing too much with them, that will be upsetting; if you reject them anyway you are only making it worse after stringing them further along. You think you are doing them a favor by giving them a little bit of you, but this will only make them angrier when they can't have all of you. You think they should be happy you spent time with them at all, they get angry that you won't spend more time with them. "Whore" is how that transaction inevitably ends. ((I mostly followed this advice, but not always as well as I should have.))
It comes back to the generalized advice I give to all young people: the optimal relationship states are Happily Married, and Slutting it Up. You should always be aiming to remain at one of those poles, the spots in the middle are hazardous, that's where people get hurt because they are emotionally depending on something that has no substance to it. If you're not married, or on the path to getting married, no commitment, no dependency, you don't make any decisions in your life with them in mind.
*I can't, of course, speak to what the viral story about your life experience must actually be like. The largest audience a short story or poem written by a former love ever found was a creative writing class; I'm lucky to have avoided sleeping with good writers, or I'm lucky to be so boring my story would never catch on.
Alternative hypothesis: the story is actually deliberate propaganda against a particular type of guy (and against a very specific guy, once you're familiar with the details), and arguably even a particular type of girl, and it's reacted to accordingly. It's a little bit like someone wrote a ficitional story about Jews murdering Christian babies, and drinking their blood, and when understandably people got upset you counter with "Well, do you murder Christian babies and drink their blood? No? So the story is not about you". Bonus points for the characters closely resembling a particular Jewish family.
Or to take a less inflammatory example, given tomes upon tomes written about various types of representation, and how they're problematic, it seems par for the course to point out the problematic nature of this particular representation. Especially since, again, it seems to closely resemble very specific people.
And when all her friends are swarming her with text messages asking if this story is about her, maybe she has a point?
That's where the story being propaganda comes in. Maybe she didn't like the looks she was getting when dating the guy, and she doesn't like the idea of the story making people treat other women the way she was treated?
But not only was "the guy was a creep all along" how the "dead author" meant it, it's how most of the audience saw it as well.
Is that what she did? Or did she write a story where her ex is a creep, as some kind of release? Because it definitely doesn't look like she just put herself in Alexis' shoes, she also had the male character behave in very particular ways, and of course she had to finish the story with him texting her "whore", just so it's clear he's a bad guy. Writing as release might still be valid, but see below:
Except this being nothing new doesn't automatically mean the authors are the ones who are right. This was even a point of drama in The Haunting of Hill House, the family was salty at their brother who made bank from writing a story about a traumatic even they all went through. Are their grievances automatically invalid because artists gonna art? I'm not convinced. Apparently neither was the author of the Haunting, since he thought it would make for a good point of drama.
I think a complication in this metaphor is that, as far as I know, Jews murdering Christian babies and drinking their blood was never once actually a thing that happened. But this archetype of creepy man is very much a real thing, and I know of a few guys at the school I went to like that. I am sympathetic to your point, because when the archetype in fiction and also the blogosphere becomes really common, it makes it seem like roughly 50% of guys are like that, and that's like an attack on all guys. But there are a real rough 1% of guys who really are just like that and I think it is important for people, and especially women, to be aware of and slightly on guard against that archetype.
If someone would write story inverting reality, with enough details that it would identify me as being involved - then I would at least try to make clear that they are malicious liars.
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