Why is Cat Person going viral again?
The short story Cat Person is in the news once more, because a woman named Alexis Nowicki has written an essay for Slate in which she explains that she is the real-life cat person the Cat Person story is based on, and that her ex-boyfriend is the other cat person in the story, and that he was actually a lovely person in real life and really did have cats and wasnt pretending, unlike in the story. Back in December 2017, a short story in the New Yorker called Cat Person went absolutely nuts online, becoming maybe the first piece of short fiction ever to do so. In it, the previously unknown writer, Kristen Roupenian, tells the story of a young womans relationship with an older man. They exchange jokes about cats. She goes to his house and he says: Just so you know, I have cats. They have sex. Later, she suspects he might not really have cats at all. Eventually she ghosts him and he sends her a text that says Whore. In the Slate story, Nowicki says that when the piece came out, she was watching Call Me By Your Name for the second time, alone. She leaves the theatre and sees that her phone is blowing up. A short story has come out in the New Yorker and her friends are texting to ask whether she wrote it under a pseudonym, or whether it is about her, or whether the man  who Nowicki calls Charles in the essay  wrote it himself. She was. In those exact words. And there are a lot of details in the story that match her real life at the time she dated Charles. The protagonist is from the same small town, goes to the same college, works at the same art house theatre. The man in the story is, like Charles in real life, a man in his 30s who is tall, slightly overweight, with a tattoo on his shoulder and wears a rabbit fur hat and a vintage coat. The decor and contents of his house are the same. But in Nowickis experience, the sex was different, and he didnt send her mean texts. In fact, she emphasises how respectful and caring he could be before he died suddenly in November last year. There is more, but you might want to read the essay for yourself (it is sad and thoughtful). And how?! Eventually Nowicki contacted Roupenian to find out. Roupenian told her that after having an encounter with the real-life Charles, she noticed he had once dated a much younger woman  Nowicki  and mined Nowickis social media for the details she used in the story. I later learned, from social media, that this man previously had a much younger girlfriend, Roupenian writes in an email. Two things. First, people are debating whether it is all right for authors to use the details of strangers lives in their fiction. Second, they are asking a question literary scholars have been discussing for centuries.