The Defining Moment of What Was Literary Twitter? Or "Discourse Person"
Going Through Old Notebooks Part 12: 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.
