One of the most incredible essays I’ve read in a long time. The author describes a bizarre situation exacerbated by tragedy. There’s no clear remedy or villain for what she’s going through, and that’s just the way life is.
I liked the “Cat Person” story when it came out, but I would much rather see this essay be made into a movie
Isn't there a villain, though? A creepy internet stalker writes a story about her stalkee's life, monetizes it and gets critical acclaim (and, again, a seven-figure advance for a collection of short stories that only had value due to that story) for it, causing her strife? I can't help but feel that there's a clear villain here, and a villain that's trying to paint herself as the victim at that.
I dunno, if “looked through social media posts of my partner with their ex” is stalking then there are a lot of stalkers out there in the world in new relationships.
Don’t get me wrong, turning that into a story with a few too many true-to-life details would absolutely weird me out too. But I’m not sure she’s a stalking villain.
> if “looked through social media posts of my partner with their ex” is stalking then there are a lot of stalkers out there in the world in new relationships.
Most of them don't wildly profit from what their partners might possibly consider to be at least a slightly unsavoury activity though.
If she’d lifted photos from his profile and published them for profit I’d agree with you. But using the photos of their relationship as inspiration for a fictional story is a much more tenuous connection. And it’s not as if the author directly wrote it with the intention to profit, the story was a huge success in a way that surprised everyone.
It isn’t the story of this woman’s relationship, she herself attests to that. It’s a story inspired by the evidence of her relationship. If asked I bet a lot of authors would say they base their stories on some kind of real world experience, does that mean they all owe royalties?
IMO one of the really interesting parts of this essay is the ambiguity. She’s upset, and upset at the author, but isn’t entirely sure if what happened was actually wrong, or what any of it means. I find that a lot more powerful than trying to cast people as unambiguous heroes or villains.
A superficial appraisal of the situation would have Cat Person be a mere amalgam of details plagiarized from social media with an ideologically derived ersatz-archetype-- a lie bolstered by purloined facts. This article, however, brings for the first time depth and truth to the former text.
Flaubert famously quipped, "Madame Bovary, c'est moi!". In the same vein, the ugly side of Cat Person's male character may not have derived merely from defamatory stereotypes, as many readers could have been forgiven for assuming, rather it may, too, have been drawn from life.
It's not abuse, it didn't even registered to me as something special, and I'm an ESL speaker. Some people, by dint of having read many books, have a rich vocabulary and use it without giving any thought to how well-read (or not) are their interlocutors.
But it wasn't about the "stalkee's life" it was an imagined story inspired by imagined characters inspired by the situation she observed. Cat Person wasn't like Charles - Charles seems to have been someone else entirely. I can imagine going to a BBQ and meeting Charles and liking him, I don't think that would be the case with Cat Person. The people who are the villains are the ones who looked at Charles and decided that Charles was Cat Person - they are like people who look at blond girls and think "idiot" and people who look at black people and think... well I won't go into what racists think. It's not the same - but it's similar, it's prejudice - less harsh and less pervasive, but it's how dumb people operate.
This is a very slippery slope. Writers imbibe all kinds of details from life, from gossip, from their families....writers are interested in people's lives. The only difference here is the apparently stark difference of her using social media as her source of detail. But it's really no different than if she read a newspaper article about someone online and borrowed detail from that.
Perhaps the only crime here, if crime there be, is an artistic one: the story is just a bit shallow.
Imagine a story about Charles the software developer, who lives in Chicago, being a horrible, predatory romantic partner.
Not trying to imply that you are one of course, but that’s about as much detail she changed from the real life story—just the names. And now it was so successful that there’s going to be made about it starring Cousin Greg from HBO’s Succession.
People love to gossip and will eventually put two and two together.
She didn't change "just the names". As the Slate article observes, she changes half the story. That's what people are mad about: that her work of fiction is mostly fictional.
The half she kept is the identifying details other than names of the actual, real-life people she based it on - so much so that their friends immediately recognised them in the story - and the half she changed is stuff internal to their relationship that those friends would have no way of identifying as false and that seemingly fits their existing sterotype-based assumptions better than the actual reality would've.
This is exactly it. I've seen nobody upset that Roupenian borrowed details, but at keeping enough details unchanged to give room for those who recognise the people to question which part is fiction and which is true in a way that casts shadows over the people it was at least party based on.
> people are mad about: that her work of fiction is mostly fictional
It's mostly fictional but apparently it comes across as true to many people on first glance. There is also a real world person which apparently many readers see an obvious link to. Regardless of how it all looks to you, surely you can appreciate how such a situation could give rise to a negative viewpoint?
It's not fiction. It's taking the personal relationship of two people and editorialising it to turn it into something it wasn't - for personal gain and political status - while causing the people in it genuine pain and grief.
It's a form of appropriation. If it was mostly fictional it could have started from a different premise and used different characters.
The character space that authors can work in is unimaginably vast, and there was no need at all to use personal experiences to "borrow" detail when some imagined experiences would have done the job just as well.
In reality the the impact of the story comes from the people it's based on - not from the creative imagination of the author, who took their private lives and feelings and distorted them into a saleable feminist parable.
If I wrote a story about ptkecat, accurately included most of the broad details about your life, but then inserted some fictional ones that portrayed you as a lying, manipulative person, would you consider that to be fictional? Would you be unjustified in being angry about it?
Worse, she injected her own experiences/narrative into a real couple's relationship details that other people also knew about. That's probably the fiction part.
"Judge Robert D. Sack of the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, author of the defamation treatise, Sack on Defamation: Libel, Slander and Related Problems, describes when a libel suit might result from a work of fiction:
“Where the defendant invents defamatory dialogue or other defamatory details in what purports to be nonfiction, uses actual people as fictional characters, or bases fictional characters on living persons but fails sufficiently to disguise the characters, so that the fictional characters are understood to be ‘of and concerning’ their living models, liability for libel may result.”" (emphasis added)
There's an AP Herbert book called "Uncommon Law", in which one of the (fictional) cases involves a crossword-setter (Mr. Haddock) who is sued for setting puzzles with defamatory clues.
For example, "Bibulous bishop". That could be any bishop, except that the space for the solution, and the other intersecting answers, narrow the field considerably, to the point that the solver is forced to conclude that Bishop XYZ is the solution.
If you follow the Assange case, then you might see a strong similarity with the idea of "jigsaw identification".
The link you've provided is interesting, but the gist of it is that it's very unlikely that you can successfully sue someone for basing a fictional story off of you; you might be able to drag them into court, but the case is difficult to win.
Fiction uses false statements about reality in order to (attempt to) describe a deeper truth. Cat Person uses true factual details (in addition to false ones) in order to concoct a lie. In that sense, it is the opposite of our usual notion of fiction.
I think this is one of those things that sounds clever and sort of seems like it must make sense, but on closer inspection doesn't hold together at all. As you yourself pointed out on this thread, the history of story writers incorporating the stories of real people into their work goes back centuries. Nor can a work of fiction "concoct a lie", at least beyond the sense that all fiction is a lie.
I think this is one of those threads where we're all trying to reason axiomatically about what fiction is, and it's taking us to some very weird nerd-alternate-reality places. We can just approach the problem empirically; in the 20th century alone, there are dozens of fiction writers who are famous for doing what the author of Cat Person did.
There's tons of ambiguity about it, hence this article and fascination with it, no? It raises the very interesting problem that literally everything about it was true, in a creepy, overly detailed way that indicates obsession, other than the horrible way it painted the man involved. Very, very, strange situation.
I can't tell if you're really mad about the article and think the author is unreasonable, or if you think I'm being unreasonable, so I'll just respond as if you're looking for evidence that this, at least somewhat, ambiguous:
> “Cat Person,” and the cultural reception to it, feels connected to the broader literary debate over “autofiction”—writing that, in its raw and confessional style, seems to blur the boundaries between the real and the invented.
"Fiction" is literally in the word "autofiction". The term means "fictional autobiography". You may have confused it with "roman à clef", which nobody says Cat Person is. We do have a term for "fiction inspired in part by real stories"; it's "fiction".
Just to clarify - if someone wrote a fictional autobiography whose subject was obviously you, would that not bother you?
I would certainly be bothered if a close friend or family member did that to me in a manner that could ever lead strangers back to me. Nor would I ever publish such a piece about one of my acquaintances without their permission.
I find the notion that such behavior could be socially acceptable quite strange.
Again: the problem I have with this argument is that it's just coming up now, despite literally centuries of fiction built out of just these kinds of stories. I don't believe this is a real concern; it's a fake concern that we're being asked to have by a Slate article. It's interesting, and I'm happy to bounce the thought around, because that's what we're here for. But, come on.
I am guessing you aren't a fan of Citizen Kane. Or how about stories that even bill themselves as based on real events like Accidental Billionaires/The Social Network? Those must be even worse if they bill themselves as the truth. Could you imagine if most people judged your personality off made up dialogue and stories told by someone who was suing you for billions of dollars?
Oh yeah, I agree. I do think a thinly disguised essay passed off as fiction could be libellous, though. And to reiterate, I don't think the Cat Person piece is libellous.
You're right, I can see it from that perspective. I find it somewhat zen in that it then becomes befuddling the author of this article injected herself into the Cat Person author's story...I do then give up & weep for the poor girl whose life this was who needs to be told she has no business injecting herself via a story about the story someone wrote about her life, this line of argument is far too meta for me for midnight EST. Cheers.
Do you weep for every member of John Updike's family? The same stuff happened to them!
The reality is, you don't; you never once thought about how Updike used his own relationships and those of his family and acquaintances as fodder. You care about this particular story for reasons other than principles. That's fine, but we should start by being honest about it.
I'm not sure what inconsistency you're pointing out; if I was related to John Updike I would not be happy if I ended up as a villain in one of his books. Wouldn't anyone not enjoy that?
As a relatively famous silicon valley person, it might actually happen to you some day, and although it would probably never happen to me I can imagine empathizing with you if you ever ended up as the bad guy in a short story.
The presentation of the story is actually pretty subtle about it's fictional nature. Nowhere in body of the story does it say it's a work of fiction. Readers the miss the small "fiction" label in the header [1] could easily make the mistake of thinking it's a real story. And as per OP many did make this mistake.
I'm quite inclined to think that the movie that Cat Person is made into would display "based on a true story" rather than the South Park fiction disclaimer. Why? Revenue.
You can see it as a villain, but the way it is presented it does not seem Nowicki sees Roupenian as a villain (though maybe she did at one point).
I think the essay is more subtle than that. She ends by describing "what's difficult about having your relationship rewritten and memorialized", rather than any sharp criticism. She describes herself as angry and frustrated earlier, but having appreciated that Roupenian was sorry.
It's quite nuanced. A lot of the essay also focuses more on other peoples (real world) interpretation of her relationship, rather than on the fictional story ("My relationship with Charles was full of shame brought on by people who assumed the worst—a predatory man asserting his power over an innocent girl").
Part of the essay focuses on how the story "blurs the boundaries between the real and the invented" but also how that affected both Charles and her in that it made him question whether he had acted like the fictional character, and "sometimes, to my own disappointment, I find myself inclined to trust Roupenian over myself" about her relationship.
The essay is just as much about how we tend to assume a lot of fiction is truer than it is when it includes even some details from reality - to the point where Nowicki finds herself trusting a total strangers interpretation of her own relationship - a relationship said stranger had never observed directly.
A key line to me is "I’ve wondered a lot about the line between fiction and nonfiction, and what license is actually bestowed by the act of labeling something as fiction." This seems to get at the core of what this essay is, with Roupenian being more of a prop to discuss this subject grounded in a real situation than a villain per se. Almost every negative about Roupenian is accompanied by a counterpoint, that while not entirely negating what is often critical does soften it.
E.g "At times I’ve convinced myself that she wanted us to know it was about us" - something that if true would certainly tip Roupenian into villain territory - is followed by "But then I remind myself that when she wrote “Cat Person,” she was still in her MFA program. No one knew her name. Submitting a story to the New Yorker was a long shot, and a piece of literary short fiction had never gone viral in this way."
It also goes towards making the argument that Roupenian was likely more toughtless than malicious, and that her thoughtlessness was somewhat understandable and would have meant very little if not for accidents of circumstance.
Does it put Roupenian in a somewhat negative light? Sure. It was stupid and thoughtless of her not to change details. But villain? I don't think she's important enough even to this essay, to be the villain of it. She plays a perfunctory part of a much more interesting story about Alexis and Charles, their relationship, and how seeing it reflected in the fictional story affected them.
I liked the “Cat Person” story when it came out, but I would much rather see this essay be made into a movie