Cat People
Is it morally acceptable to take inspiration from a stranger's life?
When the word ‘autofiction’ is entered into a Google search, four names inevitably shoot to the top of the results: Karl Ove Knausgård, Chris Kraus, Sheila Heti and Ben Lerner. But they aren’t the only people doing autofiction “right”, nor is it a new literary device. There have been more think pieces than I can count in recent years parsing the ‘real’ from the ‘fake’ in a writing category defined by the believability of its diaristic impression.
As a teen, I ended up in possession of a thin little papery volume that looked more like a zine than a book - it was titled Shoplifting from American Apparel by the writer Tao Lin. Back then, I had no frame of reference for the publishing world or how independent presses functioned, I just liked what I liked and assumed no one else liked the same things (ah, the teenage condition). Lin’s style made Bret Easton Ellis look verbose, brimming with a capitalistic ennui that I couldn’t name, but felt very drawn to in 2009. That same ennui, once fresh, now pervades everything in 2021, it is no longer niche or subversive or skittering somewhere in the background, it’s front and center in the most Netflix-ready mainstream comedy (think Bo Burnham’s song That Funny Feeling).
Back when I was having my mind blown by Tao Lin for the first time, I pretty much assumed books and articles were either: autobiographical, fictional, non-fictional, or textbooks, and that nothing toed the line between these categories. It would be another seven or eight years before I read Sheila Heti and connected what she was doing overtly (her characters having the real names of her real friends, much like Chris Kraus) to what Lin had been doing when I read him for the first time without the proper context. By that I mean: I realized that there were entire genres devoted to the craft of blending autobiography and fiction, on purpose.
With that in mind, ‘Cat Person’ is a short story by the author Kristen Roupenian that came out in The New Yorker in December of 2017 and was the first piece published to ‘go viral’ from that publication. Roupenian made headlines after receiving a sizable advance for a first book just from that one story, a heavily-reported detail which made me cringe a little on her behalf. Everyone wants to break through with a piece that people relate to, few want their payday to be the focus of the attention over the art itself. And for what it’s worth, it came back to bite her. Scout Press, a division of Simon & Schuster, paid Roupenian an advance for a compendium of short stories that would include ‘Cat Person’, entitled ‘You Know You Want This.’ Attempting to capitalize on the success of the first story, they rushed the production and release for 2019, giving Roupenian only a little over a year to hammer out the rest of the stories. Even if most of them were already done, that sounds like a very short editing process and undoubtedly a rush job. The finished book received middling reviews, with many critics picking up on a feeling of missed potential.
The content of ‘Cat Person’ itself revolves around a college student, Margot, who is very casually dating an older man in his thirties named Robert. He is painted as slightly creepy but not criminal, with a propensity towards the younger girl who he wrongly perceives as inexperienced. The story is told from Margot’s perspective, so we as readers know that a) she isn’t as into him as he is into her, b) she’s picking up on clues that something is off with him, and c) that ultimately she has a lot more to offer than he does. After a fraught sexual encounter praised for its nuanced approach to illustrating the massive gray area that is consent, our protagonist rejects the man and he lashes out via text message, revealing a painfully fragile ego.
The part of the story that seemed to resonate most with readers was the description of the reluctant sex itself, and the manipulative flirtation on both sides of the dynamic leading up to it.
Here’s an excerpt:
Looking at him like that, so awkwardly bent, his belly thick and soft and covered with hair, Margot recoiled. But the thought of what it would take to stop what she had set in motion was overwhelming; it would require an amount of tact and gentleness that she felt was impossible to summon. It wasn’t that she was scared he would try to force her to do something against her will but that insisting that they stop now, after everything she’d done to push this forward, would make her seem spoiled and capricious, as if she’d ordered something at a restaurant and then, once the food arrived, had changed her mind and sent it back.
Margot’s body complies with sex, almost without her there - in short, a spot-on depiction of sexual dissociation and the unspoken fear of saying ‘no’, or asking for it to stop. To deviate from the text here, I have experienced the fear that the main character claims she doesn’t with Robert. Myself and almost every woman I know has occasionally regretted inviting a date upstairs. We don’t want to go through with the physical intimacy that is expected, but it feels too late to call things off. Sometimes it is because we fear the reaction of the person we’re engaging with, to the point of self-defense. It is often easier to have sex you don’t really feel like having than risk a rage tantrum at the hands of a much stronger human being. Worse, by voicing one’s concern and actually saying “Stop,” one must confront the possibility that the person will not stop anyway, and then you have to deal with the psychological repercussions of voiced consent being breached.
When this piece came out, I had an alarming amount of conversations with the men in my life who were considering this as a brand new thought: a woman might be having sex with them while secretly not wanting to be. It’s a thought-provoking piece, and it is easy to understand why it went viral.
Fast forward to last week (~4 years after the publication of Cat Person), and this non-fiction personal essay on Slate started going around.
In the Slate piece, the writer (Alexis Nowicki) describes the ordeal of being written about as a fictional character by someone who doesn’t know you in real life. In this case, the writer is Roupenian, who Nowicki suspects (and later confirms) used her as the inspiration for the character of “Margot” in Cat Person. It is also revealed in the essay that Nowicki’s ex-boyfriend, Charles, was the real-life inspiration for “Robert” in Cat Person. Further complicating her feelings, it is revealed that he recently passed away, while the character loosely based on him lives on in semi-infamy.
I believe Nowicki intended her Slate piece to be about ownership in the internet age and the complications of reputation after death when a story is forever. Unfortunately, everyone on Twitter became preoccupied with a) whether or not Nowicki’s ex-boyfriend was as creepy as Cat Person’s ‘Robert’, and b) most strikingly, whether or not it was kosher for Roupenian to have written the story at all without changing key details; namely the institution where Margot attends school, the location of Margot and Robert’s first date, and where Margot works. These details were all lifted directly from Nowicki’s life, and while she is mostly forgiving to Roupenian, I can’t help but pick up on a little bit of clout-chasing here, as well as a desire to “clear” the visage of her ex's name (an impossible task given ‘Robert’ is a character, not a real person).
Every fictional character is a creation, and in the case of composite characters (see Buffalo Bill in Silence of the Lambs), many hodge-podge creations all squished together to ultimately serve one purpose: telling a compelling story. There is no way that anyone could have used the details Roupenian wrote about Margot and Robert to reverse-engineer a route to real-life Charles or Alexis. There is for sure, no element of doxxing here.
What is somewhat repellent to me is that Nowicki, in publishing this article, has revealed the direct route Roupenian took to get those characters inside the story and implicated not just herself, but her dead ex-boyfriend, as the impetus for that creation. Nowicki has expressly named her ex as the inspiration for an unsavory literary villain, something the online world did not know until she chose to share it. She has done to herself, four years later, what she was worried Roupenian might be doing at the time of the essay’s publication. I do not see what purpose this serves Nowicki other than getting her name out there. And that’s her right, especially after Roupenian got her name into the hands of a major publisher by lifting details from Nowicki’s own life.
Roupenian stands by the following: these characters were entirely made up, the story is fiction and not autofiction, and she has never met Nowicki. She does cop to having met Charles and having had an ‘encounter’ with him, something she alludes to in her first email reply to Nowicki. Roupenian is apologetic for not changing the name of the campus where Margot and Alexis both attended college, and for not making Margot work at a restaurant instead of a movie theater, she wishes she had done so in hindsight. Personally, I do not understand why the apology is necessary, as only Nowicki and Charles could have connected those dots.
From Nowicki’s Slate essay:
“But the similarities to my own life were eerie: 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).”
Are tattooed shoulders, framed posters and fairy lights rare enough in a college town to be eerie? Personally, I don’t think so. But Nowicki was right. Here’s part of what Roupenian said to her after she was confronted, included in the essay from last week:
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.
What is slightly damning to Roupenian (in that I’m not sure she’s giving Nowicki the full story surrounding her research for this piece) are the details of Margot and Robert’s text exchanges, in which they flirt through the personalities of their cats - as many a Twitter user has pointed out, the writing feels too spot-on to not be lifted from reality.
For a moment of complete tin-foil hat conjecture: I would believe Roupenian did see texts between Nowicki and Charles at some point, even though she denies it. I would even go so far as to posit that she had access to these texts because Charles sent her screenshots of them, or because she went through his phone, whenever they had the encounter Roupenian mentions in her email reply. Perhaps there was an overlap in Roupenian’s time with him and his relationship with Nowicki, something Roupenian might rightfully feel weird about revealing given the event of his passing.
Adding fuel to that fire, In Nowicki’s essay, she claims she asked Charles several times if he had ever met Roupenian - a fact he denied and Nowicki only had confirmed by a mutual contact after Charles’ death. That is suspicious, or at the very least implies a not-great interaction between him and Roupenian. After the #MeToo movement that made this essay popular in the first place, it is especially rich to me that Roupenian would receive any blowback for fictionalizing a painful personal experience.
While I feel strongly that artists don’t owe anyone an explanation for their process, our now-unfettered access to the public social media accounts of others position everyday citizens in a sort of digital fishbowl, and I understand the source of the discomfort there. Roupenian clearly had her own experience, either with Charles, or with some other guy he reminded her of, the real details of which she owes no one, and which may or may not have been a version of what “Margot” goes through with “Robert” in the original essay.
Instead of allowing for all those potential possibilities, Nowicki has pulled the very focus she claimed she was uncomfortable with back to herself and the reputation of her deceased ex. If Roupenian had a different experience with Charles, or a man kind of like Charles, it is one that bears telling all the same. Whether it was completely invented, partially embellished or 100% real ultimately doesn’t have any bearing on the quality of the piece itself, or the experience of the reader consuming it.
For all the arguing over morality, I have to wonder if Charles himself would have consented to being ‘confirmed’ as the inspiration for Robert. Isn’t making that choice for him it’s own kind of artistic license, not dissimilar to what Roupenian did to Nowicki in the first place? In Roupenian’s case, at least she had the excuse of not even knowing, in real life, the individual she based her character on. The same can’t be said for Alexis and Charles.
Using this space to remind all of my readers that the Real Housewives of Potomac has begun airing Season 5 and it is not to be missed!! I humbly request you join me for this ride.
I cannot get this promo spot (inexplicably using ‘Moment 4 Life’ by Nicki Minaj) out of my head and have been wandering around my home singing “I wish that I could have Potomac for life . . . for life . . . for life!!!” for upwards of 2 weeks: