Lots of fiction writers use real people as the bases for characters; that doesn't make them "creepy internet stalkers".
Cat Person was a work of fiction. There wasn't much ambiguity about that.
Cat Person was a work of fiction. There wasn't much ambiguity about that.
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.
> “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?