I liked the “Cat Person” story when it came out, but I would much rather see this essay be made into a movie
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.
Most of them don't wildly profit from what their partners might possibly consider to be at least a slightly unsavoury activity though.
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.
Cat Person was a work of fiction. There wasn't much ambiguity about that.
> “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.
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.
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.
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.
William Randolph Hearst certainly wasn't one!
In fact, libelous material is by definition fictional - imputing someone's character by making stuff up.
Now I think that this is fiction, but it is definitely skirting the line and the author should probably have changed a few more details.
This is a bizarre demand to make of a work of fiction. How many fictional stories mention they are fiction in the body of the work?
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.
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.
She didn't take two fictionalised people and give them someone's perfectly normal, boring sex life.
Instead she took two real people including detailed descriptions of them accurate enough that they could later be correctly identified.
She then twisted their relationship to make one a victim and the other, her former romantic parter, a cartoon misogynist.
Those that recognise the people involved may well still think "well there's no smoke without fire" regardless of her claim that it's all "fictional".
"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)
https://www.freedomforuminstitute.org/first-amendment-center...
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".
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.
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.
Very good article. Moving, and oddly redemptive.
What are you trying to say? This comment made me the most upset×angry I've ever been on HN. Feels like an abuse of language.
Perhaps the only crime here, if crime there be, is an artistic one: the story is just a bit shallow.
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.