Excerpt: Sometimes you create a monster and are proud of the havoc it wreaks upon the world. Sometimes you create a monster and watch it do its thing and then realise that it has just turned around and is about to devour you.
Have you ever watched a cat vomit a hairball onto the floor or, more likely, your brand new and very pretty rug? That which issues forth is always vile and un-cute, and sometimes quite smelly. It compels you to ask, “How did something so disgusting emerge from a wondrous little beastie like yourself, My Overlord?” At which point, the cat will give said hairball a cursory glance, look at you, shrug, and walk over to the freshly filled water bowl.
Kristen Roupenian’s now famous short story “Cat Person,” about sex and misogyny, is like a hairball that keeps getting vomited back up but its origin lies not in a form filled with beauty and covered in luscious, silky fur but the New Yorker, also very famous, as a magazine (and arguably one of the few survivors from what some might call a Golden Age of Magazines). The New Yorker is many things to many people. For some it’s a source of often annoying cartoons that are frequently un-funny but which exist because there is an entire universe of people determined to flood your feed with links to them because they believe this makes them look terribly, terribly smart and urbane and like characters in a brilliant mid-career Woody Allen film, the ones filled with very smart people who speak in paragraphs to each other about therapy and Nietzsche. That may seem like an old-fashioned reference, but if you’ve read the work of Adam Gopnik—whose work makes the magazine particularly tedious—you know that waves of newcomers to New York have insisted on swimming in such stereotypes.
For others, the New Yorker is home to some excellent long-form essays, and a lot of the poetry—like my very favourite one, Robert Hass’s “Then Time”—can be incandescent. The editorial essays are mostly liberal garbage (please note I say that as someone often criticised for being ultra-left, so don’t try to friend me if you’re a Trump supporter, or any kind of liberal, or a mere leftist). Even when written by women or possibly women of colour (has such an event ever occurred? I’m not savvy enough to know or to keep track), they all seem to be written by a huffy, purse-lipped white man in his fifties who recycles everything, whose two daughters attend Spence, whose custom tuxedo is hanging on a hook on the door ready for tonight’s gala in honour of Mother, and who is glad that Trump is gone because, really, it was shocking, the lack of class in that man, his complete inability to lock up immigrants with the decorum and discretion we are accustomed to in our elites.
Yes, I am aware that some of these are stereotypes but they are also why people read the New Yorker. See above: Adam Gopnik.
And then there is the fiction. Oh, dear kittens, there is the fiction, and there is some of it in every issue and sometimes an entire issue is filled with it and it is abominable. When I first tried the magazine, I was in graduate school and in an English department, so I would religiously read the short stories because this was something you were expected to do back then (and before I fell swooning into the arms of critical theory). Which is to say, I would religiously try my damndest to finish even one, and fail. Since then, I’ve renewed my subscription several times and also let it lapse just as often. Over the course of a year, I will accumulate copies of the magazine because one accumulates more than one actually reads the New Yorker. At the end of that year, I’ll try to find someone to whom I might give away my mostly unread collection, thinking that surely someone out there will be delighted to acquire it. But I live in Hyde Park now where the University of Chicago was deliberately, actually, literally, in the most correct sense of that word, constructed to look like Oxbridge and it’s all very literary and smart and the place is filled with people whose houses sometimes tip to one side from the weight of all the New Yorkers that have been quietly accumulating in unvisited corners of basements. Eventually, I just chuck ’em.
We digress, somewhat. “Why is New Yorker fiction so bad?” is a question heard in several quarters but answering it will require patience and time I don’t have right now. Answering would also require me to go back and slog through a substantial number of short stories in the magazine to give you quotes and such to prove my point, and I would rather live in a cat’s litter box for a week.
This is about “Cat Person.” So.
There are perhaps—and I am making this up—twenty English language stories that have become iconic and entered not just our everyday language but our ways of reflexively engaging in public and private. A friend and I once brought gifts to each other after too long apart, and they were both the same and I laughed and said it was like an O’Henry story. And it wasn’t really quite like “The Gift of the Magi” but close enough, and we each knew what I meant without my naming it. One of us had not cut off her locks and the other had not sold his watch but, whatever, close enough, kinda. We weren’t penurious lovebirds pecking and cooing on Christmas morn, but we’d thought about the same thing. A reference to the story can be glancing but it knits people together for a brief moment in a shared memory and knowledge.
“Cat Person” is not that kind of story. When it’s referenced, it’s mostly pinned to a larger discourse around it which is to say, the story “Cat Person” is much less interesting than the story about “Cat Person.” And if a story were a person, this one would be curled up crying in a corner, wishing that people would stop reading about it and just read it, damn it.
It went viral in December 2017, hopping from screen to screen at a fast pace until four million had devoured it in one way or another. The trouble with counting clicks is that you can’t really tell what they mean—an actually engaged read or a read and then a quick yelp of anger and some barfing (which was my response). Still, in a world of publishing where actual reading is beside the point and it’s more important to show that you have read about something, “Cat Person” went viral, much to the delight of the fiction editor at the New Yorker, Deborah Treisman. I have to imagine that Roupenian was also happy but I doubt that her current emotion is one of delight. Sometimes you create a monster and are proud of the havoc it wreaks upon the world. Sometimes you create a monster and watch it do its thing and then realise that it has just turned around and is about to devour you.
I read “Cat Person” a while after all the fuss exploded and my first impression was that this was not so much a product of the writer but of an editor who took one look at a draft and thought, “Holy #MeToo, this will be gold.” It’s not terribly written, but it’s also not … great or interesting. Which is to say, it’s typical of a New Yorker story. Treisman’s genius as an editor, it seems, is her ability to look at a story and get rid of its most interesting parts so that it might fit the template of “New Yorker fiction.” Read just three New Yorker stories one after the other in a single sitting: I defy you to not fall asleep and, once you’ve woken up repeatedly to finish the task, tell me if you can distinguish one writer’s voice from the others. Treisman could get Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, and Somerset Maugham to write stories for her and they would all be delivered in that flat, vapid, disinterested tone, telling of flat, vapid events that barely tremble on the page leave alone leap into the reader’s consciousness. There’s an inherent blandness to a New Yorker short story, as if the reader is an invalid who, exhausted from the energy and intensity of the world, needs nothing more than a soothing bowl of warm, watery oatmeal, sprinkled with some freshly ground pepper to wake the taste buds just enough, not too much.
In “Cat Person,” the pepper is the ending and the last word, “Whore.” The story, which is actually about two assholes, Margot and Robert, not just one (Margot is an immature jerk, a fact that seems to have escaped notice) plugged into the zeitgeist, giving many women an anthem of sorts. Its tale of clumsy sex and of a man angry that a woman might have rejected him resonated with people who held it up as an exemplar of What Women Have to Go Through. The U.S had just acquired a president caught boasting about sexually assaulting women, and it seemed like the floodgates to…something… had burst open. “Cat Person” appeared to reflect the experiences of women, perhaps particularly young women in their early 20s who are trying to negotiate sex as they began their dating lives, especially when the men are older than them: Robert is more than a decade older than Margot and that age difference is seen as contributing to his almost predatory and abusive responses to her. It’s a story as old as bad romance: creepy older guy and sweetly innocent and bewildered younger girl who narrowly escapes him. The overwhelmingly positive responses indicated that a lot of women, particularly of that age, had gone or were going through what Margot experienced, or at least felt they were going through something similar.
The story has given Roupenian a certain kind of fame but also, and much more importantly, the kind of financial security unheard of for a writer just starting out. She received a seven-figure advance and a two-book deal from Scout Press, an imprint of Simon and Schuster. The first of those, You Know You Want This, is an anthology of stories that include “Cat Person,” and it appears to have come and gone without much of a trace. In June of this year came the news that there is to be a feature film based on the story, starring Nicholas Braun, and it is described as a “thriller.” Which is strange because the story is fairly straightforward and it’s hard to tell how the film might construct suspense without actually writing a different tale altogether. It has been reported that HBO will develop an anthology series based on the stories in the book. Roupenian has also sold her first screenplay for a horror film, Bodies, Bodies, Bodies.
Some of the fuss around Roupenian reflects a certain envy at her financial success, among writers and non-writers alike. To which I have to respond: most writers make so little money that anyone who hits the jackpot, as Roupenian has, should be cheered on and told to take the money and run, run, run, and keep working on your writing, something you can now do with the gift of time and so much more (all the sushi you want, dental care, a place to live, and so on). The problem isn’t that Roupenian got that kind of advance as a beginning writer who produced a not-great story. The problem is a publishing industry that heaps massive amounts of money on very few writers in the hope of generating bestsellers, while consistently refusing to support writers and writing by giving better and more sustainable advances to, dare we say, all of them. The problem is a world, yes, an entire world, that still thinks that writing is a mere hobby and that it should never be paid for because, surely, writers are just so happy to do something they enjoy because, of course, writing is never labour. The problem is that too many writers bristle when it’s suggested that, perhaps, they need to think of writing as labour, and that they are also workers whose work should be adequately compensated. If writers actually banded together and demanded more equitable treatment from publishers, we might not see such massively disproportionate amounts doled out. But most writers think they’re the special ones, that they will be the ones to win The Big Advances Lottery, and so few will rock the boat by demanding changes to a deeply flawed system.
That being said, it’s also worth considering and remembering that a lot of what Roupenian has gained is also in large part due to her position as either an already relatively well-off white woman or at least someone who has had access to the kinds of social and cultural and, yes, economic equity that a lot of writers, particularly POC and Black writers, don’t have. Roupenian went to Barnard, has a PhD from Harvard and an MFA from the University of Michigan: even if her family doesn’t have massive wealth, she has benefited from being adjacent to and possibly part of networks that have made her financial success that much easier to attain and maintain (and maintaining is the key part: it’s one thing to make massive amounts of money, but actually keeping and growing it so you’re set for life takes a team of experts). There’s no blame to be placed on any individuals for any of this, but all of this context needs to be considered so that we don’t continue with the myth of The Writer Who Just Emerged from Nowhere.
Which brings us back to “Cat Person,” its form as a piece of fiction, and the new controversy that blew up around it this summer.
On July 8, Slate published a story by Alexis Nowicki, “‘Cat Person’ and Me.” In it, Nowicki details how she realised the relationship between Robert and Margot is based on her own relationship with a man she refers to as Charles (not his real name). She had never met Roupenian but it was clear that the writer knew a lot of details, including some about their first date. But while there was a lot of overlap, “Cat Person” also diverged significantly from the reality of Nowicki’s relationship, which included the fact that Charles had been a kind, loving, and gentle partner, despite (or, who knows, because of) their age difference. Charles died in November 2020, and Nowicki and his friends have confirmed that he was baffled by the representation of him in the story, and worried and wondered if he had been a “slimeball.”
Nowicki contacted Roupenian while working on the piece for Slate, and the latter admitted to having known Charles, adding,
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.
She went on,
I can absolutely see why the inclusion of those details in the story would cause you significant pain and confusion, and I can’t tell you how sorry I am about that. I hope it goes without saying that was never my intention, and I will do what I can to rectify any harm it caused. …I have always felt that my insistence that the story was entirely fiction, and that I was not accusing any real-life individual of behaving badly, was all that stood between me and an outpouring of not only rage but potentially violence.
That last sentence is gratuitous and makes little sense and Nowicki points out, astutely, “I could sense in her email that she hoped I might feel guilty about potentially encouraging the misdirected rage of her male readers. And I was angry, still—that someone who knows so intensely about what it’s like to watch your readers misconstrue fiction as autobiography would have dragged others, without their knowledge, into that discomfort.”
Nowicki’s sense of anger and betrayal are justified, from her point of view, and Roupenian apologises for having caused “pain and confusion.” The internet had another explosion around “Cat Person” when Nowicki’s story came out, with intense debates on social media about what the ethics of using other people’s lives might be.
But “ethics,” whatever that means, should never be part of any discussion about whether or not to use real people and their lives in fiction. Fiction does what fiction must: sometimes a writer makes shit up and sometimes a writer uses the lives and thoughts and deeds of people she has known. And the question isn’t even, did Roupenian portray Charles accurately or not? (I will admit that his label for a donation he sent to Nowicki for a BLM-related fundraiser—“Something aggressive [fist emoji] not milquetoast neoliberal”—warmed my heart). Was Charles possibly different depending on which woman he was with? Perhaps, but who knows? None of these questions are in themselves particularly interesting except to Nowicki, her friends, those who hold the memory of Charles dear, and to Roupenian, who seemed to not have anticipated that the subjects of her story would actually read it and recognise themselves.
Far more interesting is the question of what the differences mean in the story itself. My hunch about “Cat Person” is that Treisman knew, when she laid eyes on it, that the story would prove to be popular, even if she may not have guessed how viral it would become. My hunch is that the story was edited, a lot, so that there was a clarity to the opposition between the two main characters. In her piece, Nowicki writes movingly and clearly about the stress she and Charles felt about how the world perceived their age differences: two classmates refused to rent with her when they found out about her older boyfriend. There was also clearly a deep sweetness and tenderness in their relationship, even after they formally broke up. But even if Roupenian had gleaned any of that from talking to Charles, she could never have used such details in “Cat Person” because “Cat Person” was always designed, groomed, like a prince fated to be King, to be nothing but “Cat Person.”
I don’t mean to try and uncover The Story Behind the Making of Cat Person. My point is not about intentionality—did Roupenian actually plan on writing a different kind of story? Is she an asshole for having (perhaps) changed Charles’s character so much?—but about how certain stories about certain experiences and people (20-something women and their sexual experiences) are in a sense always already written, especially when they’re aimed for a New Yorker audience. A story published in the New Yorker doesn’t take risks, doesn’t challenge its readers and, indeed, some stories seem to have little point—the last one I read all the way through mostly just followed some people through their daily lives in a very uninteresting way, and I’m not sure if I read a report on events or a piece of fiction (perhaps the pages stuck together, and I didn’t notice). But in “Cat Person” Treisman found a story that bore the appearance of something interesting since it had all the elements necessary for popular fiction: a young girl, a rapacious older man, fumbling sex that could, in an era of #MeToo easily be read as non-consensual, and that clincher of an ending. It’s likely that “Cat Person” wouldn’t have caused a ripple in, say, 2014, or that, if published today, it wouldn’t create such a sensation. “Cat Person” was a short story that could only have gone viral sometime between November 8, 2016 and November 3, 2020.
Which is fine. All literature is of its time, after all. The problem with “Cat Person” isn’t that it’s a middling story that became popular. The problem is that its massive success in a publication that already determines how and what we define and read as “literature” means that it will become the template for future and present fiction writers. Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore points out that “the real scandal is why does the New Yorker have so much power over literature?” From here on, even more aspiring writers will only aspire to “viral” as the marker of success in writing, without paying attention to the integrity of their work. And we may be doomed to hearing about “Cat Person” over and over again.
I’m sympathetic to Roupenian. She’s not untalented or without potential, but I wonder if she’ll ever be allowed to actually develop—are we allowed to use such words now?—her craft. Will she go on to become a writer, or will she always be the person who wrote “Cat Person?”
For more on writing, see:
“The Publishing World Is Like Fyre Fest.”
I’m a Freelance Writer. I Refuse to Work for Free.
“Is Your Reading Material Ethically Sourced?”
“Scabs: Academics and Others Who Write for Free.”
“Scabs and the Seductions of Neoliberalism.”
“On Writers as Scabs, Whores, and Interns, And the Jacobin Problem.”
“Make Art! Change the World! Starve!: The Fallacy of Art as Social Justice, Part I.”
You can also listen to me talk about publishing on the Current Affairs podcast with Lyta Gold.
And here, with Trevor Beaulieu of the Champagne Sharks podcast.
Don’t plagiarise any of this, in any way. Read and memorise “On Plagiarism.” There’s more forthcoming, as I point out in “The Plagiarism Papers.” I have used legal resources to punish and prevent plagiarism, and I am ruthless and persistent. If you’d like to support me, please donate and/or subscribe, or get me something from my wish list. Thank you.
Image: Frida The Magnificent.