Going Through Old Notebooks Part 12: The Defining Moment of What Was Literary Twitter? Or "Discourse Person"
On empathy, fiction, plagiarism, the woman as artist, the short story that launched a thousand takes—and the lost world we writers once shared online.
Dear Reader, please forgive this revisiting of a rather cursed online discourse moment from some years back, but it looks like “Cat Person” might be about to win Lit Hub’s What Was Literary Twitter? bracket. (Thanks for letting me know, Lilly Dancyger). Recently, in rereading this in my old notebook entries, I found parts of it somewhat interesting, so who knows, maybe you will too? Here’s hoping, at least. Trigger warning, obviously, for Kristen Roupenian’s short story “Cat Person,” its follow-up essay, and the many takes that followed, including this one. Anyway, here we go.
In the summer of 2021, in a corner of the Internet once known as “literary Twitter,” a strange sort of gladiatorial spectacle erupted. It was about topics that matter a great deal to me: art, and who gets taken seriously when making it; empathy, and what we owe one another; authorship, and who gets to tell which stories; gender, and how art by women gets interpreted differently than art by men.
At its core, it was also about the problem of artistic license, and how we decide what is fair game, what is off limits, and what counts as “plagiarism,” when no lines, paragraphs, or even themes have been taken or adapted from another existing text.
But first, some background.
In late 2017, the New Yorker published a short story by Kristen Roupenian called “Cat Person.” You may remember it. It was the first—and only—piece of short fiction to ever go viral. And boy, did it ever. Everyone was reading it. Roupenian’s story collection was subsequently acquired by Penguin Random House for a reported seven figures, and since the original writing of this take, a film version came out starring Nicholas Braun and Emilia Jones.
That virality was down to a few things, I think, but was mostly due to the story’s themes. It was about the sense of sexual obligation that so many women (especially young women) feel towards the men around them, as well as the sudden and disorienting alienation we sometimes experience when the social intimacy we think we’ve cultivated through technology suddenly turns out to be false. What struck me about the story was the way in which the female main character felt she had forged a connection over text with a man she had met, only to realize upon meeting him again that it had all been in her head.
Their initial intimacy, cultivated via an easy text rapport and superficial common interests, like a love of cats, turns out to be an illusion. In person, the chemistry isn’t there. She sleeps with him, despite feelings of apprehension, pity, and even revulsion, then ghosts him. Over text, his “nice guy” act gradually falls away, and ends with him calling her a “whore.”
Many women who read the story were struck by the familiarity of this scenario: Despite no overt threat of violence, the young woman did not feel that she had the right or even the ability to say no to this man whom she didn’t really want to sleep with, but then did so anyway.
What the story was about was of great interest to me, both as a woman and as a person who thinks and writes about gendered iterations of power. It explored that uncomfortable gray area that lies between social pressure and the legal definition of rape—the sex which women have but don’t really want or enjoy, and yet ostensibly “consent” to, within a culture of unvoiced threat and coercion, and the fear of physical or psychological violence that can arise if they do say, clearly, no…because what if that “no” is ignored? Especially once they’ve already found themselves in an intimate setting, many women find it hard to justify their “no,” fearing it won’t be respected, and that when it isn’t, no one will believe them.
A year later, the comedian Aziz Ansari would get MeToo’d—his career changed forever—due to a similar bad date scenario: a woman who was hesitant to say “no” to him engaged in an encounter she found uncomfortable, and then later referred to it not just as bad sex or a poor choice, but as a kind of “assault.”
Her direct quote: “It took a really long time for me to validate this as sexual assault…I was debating if this was an awkward sexual experience or sexual assault.”
So, was Cat Person a story of assault? Not by any legal definition perhaps, but it touched on something many women were eager to discuss, and the definition was in active flux.
This was a culture shift, and many people, including many women, did not agree about it. Can a sexual encounter be considered assault if a person, an adult, neither says no nor actively attempts to leave? In the real life Ansari scenario, the specter of power—a wealthy, famous man, on a date with a “normal,” non-famous woman—hung over the whole thing as well.
There seemed to be a generational divide that was making itself known among the women who discussed this in public too: Gen X women and older, who’d been raised in a culture where even a loudly voiced “NO!” was not always enough, and younger generations of women who had been taught to expect better, and yet often found themselves having plenty of sex with men they didn’t want or didn’t enjoy anyway, due to expectations set in place by social pressures, pornography, etc. A loud “no” was no longer supposed to be necessary, and the concept of “enthusiastic consent” had been introduced, and yet still things weren’t quite working out as they should.
I wrote a little about this phenomenon in my 2019 book, High Heel:
What we are seeing now […] is a glimpse at the extent to which women are still expected or compelled to submit to men, either through sexual bullying, in professional settings, or through a persistent culture of intimidation, fear, and obligation that exists in women’s personal relationships with men. Young women are speaking out, not just about the sexual interactions they are forced to have against their will, but about the sex they ostensibly “consent” to but do not want, do not enjoy, but which they decide to endure anyway. They do this because they fear hurting a man’s feelings, fear not meeting his expectations, or fear the hostility, wrath, and possibly even violence that commonly results from doing so. (p.123-124)
I thought the depiction of this scenario in “Cat Person” was important, but I was less interested in the broader discourse around the story’s ubiquity. Some people were simply annoyed by its constant presence, with the illustration of two mouths meeting always at the top of their social media feed. Some were thrilled by the success of any piece of short fiction, while others felt the author did not deserve the hefty book advance, nor the sale of the film rights that followed.
Then, three and a half years after the story was first published, a writer named Alexis Nowicki published an essay in Slate called “Cat Person and Me.” In it, she revealed that superficial aspects of the characters in the story had been inspired by real people, namely her ex-boyfriend, whom Roupenian had known, and herself, whom Roupenian had not, but heard about. The ex-boyfriend had recently passed away, perhaps leading Nowicki to feel that she was free to tell this story in public.
Hence, the conversation exploded once again.
It is important to note here that the actual story that occurs in “Cat Person,” the plot—the texts, the awkward one-night-stand, the hostility that follows, as well as its themes of alienation, sexual coercion, and misogyny—are not what were allegedly taken from real life.
The things that Roupenian lifted from her own experience were the mannerisms and physical appearance of the male main character, including the appearance of his house, style of dress, certain place names, and the fact that he had had a relationship with a much younger woman. Both the story and Nowicki’s essay feature a man in his thirties dating a college student, and this female character had the same part-time job at an art house movie theater, and came from the same hometown that Nowicki had.
Unfortunately, these things were enough to cause Nowicki’s phone to blow up with texts after the story went viral. The people in her life were asking her: “Is this about you?”
She writes:
“The protagonist was a girl from my small hometown who lived in the dorms at my college and worked at the art house theater where I’d worked and dated a man in his 30s, as I had. I recognized the man in the story, too. His appearance (tall, slightly overweight, with a tattoo on his shoulder). His attire (rabbit fur hat, vintage coat). His home (fairy lights over the porch, a large board game collection, framed posters).”
The essay is fascinating for its depiction of such a singular and disorienting experience of recognizing oneself, unexpectedly, in a work of art. It goes on to detail how she eventually discovered that Roupenian had in fact known her ex, called “Charles” (a pseudonym), and that she had used the broad strokes of his past relationship with this much younger woman—including the details of her job and home town—as the scaffolding on which to hang her own story of mistaken intimacies and bad sex.
Nowicki wrote that she was traumatized by the experience of seeing herself reflected in a viral piece of fiction in this way, and who can blame her. The experience of reading “Cat Person” was eerie and familiar enough for many women. She, as many did, wondered how Roupenian had managed to access her interior world so vividly. Add to that the jarring realization that a passing glance at her real life had in fact inspired its set pieces, and a certain kind of existential crisis seems almost inevitable. The story was about her, in a way, but also completely wasn’t.
However, as Nowicki went on to explain what really happened with “Charles,” including a significant three-year relationship and a protracted break-up, it quickly became clear that the story written by Roupenian was not based on their real story at all. The details she took were, in fact, all superficial: appearances, jobs, items of clothing, place names.
Even Nowicki acknowledged this at the outset:
“Some of the most pivotal scenes—the sexual encounter and the hostile text messages—were unfamiliar to me.”
But in “Cat Person,” the sexual encounter and the hostile text messages were the story. Nowicki—understandably—couldn’t get past the specter of “Charles” and his exploits with a younger woman from her home town, working at the movie theater where she also worked, and wearing his same rabbit fur hat. To her, these details were the most interesting part, and for good reason. But that was not the case for the general reader. To everyone else, these details were not only not especially unique or noteworthy, but on a certain level, wholly immaterial. They were simply the set dressing for another story, a tale as old as time—or at least as old as texting and the Internet. (However, in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Love In The Time of Cholera, the female protagonist Fermina Daza experiences a similar realization that the feverish love she thought she had felt writing to Florentino Ariza for years had, in fact, been a kind of fantasy: once she found herself actually standing in front of him, the feeling vanished.)
On reading the essay, I was immediately reminded of one of the most evocative fragments from Sarah Manguso’s 2017 book 300 Arguments, about seeing herself reflected in the fiction of a man she had been involved with:
“The man who had me in a phone booth married quickly after the affair ended. His novel had everything in it—the phone booth, the shame, the sash he sewed to wear over the surgical appliance in his belly. In the novel it covers a plastic leg cast. The front page of his website is a glowing glass phone booth standing alone in snow. The book got bad reviews. He has two children.”
The way in which Manguso turns the authorial gaze back on him is so economical, so devastating, but even in this, a far more personal and specific instance of artistic mirroring, the magpie lifting that all fiction writers do, one cannot truly assert that the novel which features sex in a phone booth is really about Manguso. I’d wager that Manguso would agree with me, although she nevertheless retains the right to skewer him and mirror his mirroring back in the way that she so expertly does: Want to write about me in your book? Okay, but then I will write about you writing about me in mine.
Even though I have so far only published nonfiction, I have written fiction, and know that by the time a person or event from “real life” has been ground up and refashioned into fiction, its meaning and significance have shifted dramatically for the author. Maybe the phone-booth-man was working out his issues with Manguso in the novel, but maybe not. Does he, too, not have a right to mine and refashion the passing iconography of his own existence?
What is permissible for a fiction writer to take from their surroundings, and what is not? A phone booth? A rabbit fur hat? A string of fairy lights? One could argue that the more removed the details are from the writer’s own personal life, and those they are close to, or the more scattered, coming less from the same person or true story, then the less harm is caused by incorporating them. But sometimes the details of near strangers can come back to haunt you, too, as was the case with Roupenian. So many stories, and even pop songs, if not most of them, are indeed inspired by small moments and details from real life—sometimes from the lives of people the writer has never even met.
According to an episode of This American Life, the Bonnie Raitt song “I Can’t Make You Love Me” was written by Mike Reid and Allen Shamblin after reading a brief newspaper article about a man who’d gotten drunk and shot up his girlfriend’s car. At his sentencing, he was asked if he had learned any lessons from what he’d done, and his reply was: “Yes. You can’t make a woman love you if she don’t.”
Our own parents’ love story1, a man jailed for shooting up his girlfriend’s car, a trip to Pamplona with a group of friends in the 1920s2, a man in his thirties, whom a writer meets, who once dated a teenage girl who lived in a dorm and worked at an art house movie theater—these are, in fact, the stuff that many great works of art are made of.
“I agree the scenario described by the essayist is interesting and unnerving (it’s a very specific situation heightened by a lot of unlikely variables),” the acclaimed writer Carmen Maria Machado tweeted about the fracas at the time (this tweet has since been deleted or is otherwise unavailable), “but the idea that a fiction writer doing what literally every fiction writer does being unethical or unusual is ridiculous.”
What I found most alarming in the polarized discourse that followed was the conflation of inspiration with plagiarism. Roupenian had pick-pocketed details from the life of an acquaintance, for a story that ultimately had nothing to do with that acquaintance or his real relationship. This was not a case of inaccurate reportage, or of stealing someone else’s story or words. The story was not a “retelling” of Nowicki’s experience, as she claimed, and did not “memorialize” her relationship in any way, even if it may have felt that way to her. It makes sense that she did not ultimately recognize herself in the story’s female main character, or in what happened to her, because the character was not her. And yet instead of feeling pacified by this marked divergence from fact, some demanded that Nowicki be given the right to “set the record straight.”
Some even suggested that Roupenian had failed as a fiction writer by drawing from life, but to suggest such a thing is indeed preposterous, as Machado said—even dangerous—in that it not only threatens to discount the important reality of what fiction is, what it does, and why it is important, but also plays into the tired and sexist trope of erasing the achievements of women artists by denying their right to create as men do, and insisting that all women’s work must be personal, secretly factual, and therefore illegitimate as art.
Tellingly, when “Cat Person” was first published, many of those commenting on it repeatedly referred to it not as a short story, but as a “piece” or “essay,” as if it were a personal divulging and not a work of fiction. Some of that confusion, conscious or not, continued to plague the conversation as it unfolded.
Then there was the question of empathy when it comes to art. What happened with Nowicki and Roupenian wasn’t plagiarism, but it may not have been very kind. One could argue that the inclusion of these unchanged details were careless at best, cruel at worst, although Roupanian herself said that she never imagined her story would gain the scope it eventually did, or find its way to the awareness of the people she had sketched in superficial terms—her first and unexpected “big break.” But that is perhaps another conversation. The broader arguments against Roupenian often hewed alarmingly close to the problems addressed in Joanna Russ’s 1983 book How To Suppress Women’s Writing:
“She didn’t write it. She wrote it but she shouldn’t have. She wrote it, but look what she wrote about. She wrote it, but she only wrote one of it. She wrote it, but she isn’t really an artist and it isn’t really art. She wrote it, but she had help. She wrote it, but she’s an anomaly. She wrote it BUT…”
The constant need to ferret out the ways in which fiction written by women must somehow be “real” or “autobiographical” and therefore not creations, not art, in ways that male authors are not held to, is a denial of the woman as artist. In this instance, the accusation was even one of theft. The actual story part of the story was largely ignored at this stage.
It’s hard to imagine two men having the same exchange: “I’m the man who worked in a café like the one in this story, who dated an older woman who wore a green coat, as this fictional woman did, but that’s not what our relationship was like!” Well, of course not. If such a thing were to be published, it would probably be a story of inspiration, of being a kind of artist’s model, eager to share the real story, not an accusation focused on ethical crimes or “getting the story wrong.” In fiction, female authors are constantly asked to explain how their personal experiences have somehow qualified them to tell the stories they are telling, and live under the constant suspicion that their fiction isn’t really fiction at all, even when they use the same level of real-world inspiration as their male peers. And yet, when they haven’t personally experienced the events of the story, they can also be accused of appropriation, and feel pressured to divulge personal information they would rather have kept private.
In nonfiction, even the smallest mention of the first-person self by a female author can cause a topical narrative nonfiction story to be recast as memoir. Men, on the other hand, and by comparison, are rarely asked what qualifies them to tell a fictional story, or even a nonfiction one. Just their interest is enough. They can be as involved as they like in their narrative nonfiction tales, without having their books labeled as memoir or dismissed as personal and therefore non-expert, not about big ideas, and topically non-serious.
In the case of “Cat Person,” a private acknowledgement from the author, when confronted by the distressed subject of her inspiration, did seem appropriate in this instance.
As Roupenian herself explained to Nowicki in an email :
“When I was living in Ann Arbor, I had an encounter with a man. I later learned, from social media, that this man previously had a much younger girlfriend. I also learned a handful of facts about her: that she worked in a movie theater, that she was from a town adjacent to Ann Arbor, and that she was an undergrad at the same school I attended as a grad student. Using those facts as a jumping-off point, I then wrote a story that was primarily a work of the imagination, but which also drew on my own personal experiences, both past and present. In retrospect, I was wrong not to go back and remove those biographical details, especially the name of the town. Not doing so was careless.”
Roupenian may have experienced a moment of carelessness, even a failure of empathy, or at least a failure of foresight concerning the story’s reach, when she did not change these superficial details, but it is not tantamount to the theft of another person’s story. Nowicki had every right to be upset by this strange series of events, and to write publicly about such a singular experience, finding herself recognized within a famous work of fiction. But she also chose to draw attention to herself and the now deceased male subject, who may not have wanted to be so publicly associated with the story in this way, especially to such an unflattering fictional character, and yet could no longer consent either way.
I get why the response essay was published. “I’m the real woman from Cat Person” is good clickbait. If a person I cared for had passed away, and I felt they had been awkwardly and unflatteringly portrayed in a work of fiction, I’d be upset too. I might even feel the urge to say to people “hey listen, the man in this story might look like him, maybe even act a little like him, but he wasn’t like that, we weren’t like that.” I get it. I can see myself having that impulse too.
In retrospect however, publishing that essay in the form in which it appeared, feels, to me, a little exploitative, with a whiff of the First Person Industrial Complex. I think I would have preferred it if its editor had pushed a little harder for an understanding of the difference between reality and fiction; between the sketch of a stranger and that stranger’s true self. Instead, the essay explicitly claimed that this work of fiction, which drew on Roupenian’s own experiences and imagination, was ultimately “about” Nowicki and the man she knew, that their relationship had been “rewritten and memorialized,” when of course neither scenario was the case. The story was not about them. Its author borrowed a place, a rabbit fur hat, a movie theater, a bachelor apartment, a gender gap relationship, but it was about other things. Understanding that difference is, I think, important for all of us to remember.
Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez was based in part, he said, on his own parent’s courtship.
The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway was, he said, based on a real trip he took during which he began an affair, at least emotionally, that ended his first marriage. The main character’s war-caused impotence is perhaps a stand-in for Hemingway’s own unavailability due to his marital status.
What a great thoughtful discourse. I wasn't clear whether you had published it here before or it was in your notebooks and never published. I've never read this and I love it. I read 'Cat Woman' when it first came out in the New Yorker and followed its trajectory into digital fame. But I knew nothing about what followed so this was fascinating. Both that it happened and the obvious questions about why N would want to bring so much attention to herself if she was already 'upset' that she had been 'outed', so to speak. And the sad state of so much of women's writing -- to expect anything and everything that will shine a negative light on one's writing.
Summer, I'm so glad you are publishing more often. It's good to have you back even if much of it is you revisiting past work. For many of us, it is new. I'm sure for all of us it is provocative and after reading an article this morning on AI and the lack of critical thinking, I'm graterful to you for pushing critical thinking.