Comment by danso

I dunno, if “looked through social media posts of my partner with their ex” is stalking then there are a lot of stalkers out there in the world in new relationships.

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.

A superficial appraisal of the situation would have Cat Person be a mere amalgam of details plagiarized from social media with an ideologically derived ersatz-archetype-- a lie bolstered by purloined facts. This article, however, brings for the first time depth and truth to the former text.

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.

But it wasn't about the "stalkee's life" it was an imagined story inspired by imagined characters inspired by the situation she observed. Cat Person wasn't like Charles - Charles seems to have been someone else entirely. I can imagine going to a BBQ and meeting Charles and liking him, I don't think that would be the case with Cat Person. The people who are the villains are the ones who looked at Charles and decided that Charles was Cat Person - they are like people who look at blond girls and think "idiot" and people who look at black people and think... well I won't go into what racists think. It's not the same - but it's similar, it's prejudice - less harsh and less pervasive, but it's how dumb people operate.

This is a very slippery slope. Writers imbibe all kinds of details from life, from gossip, from their families....writers are interested in people's lives. The only difference here is the apparently stark difference of her using social media as her source of detail. But it's really no different than if she read a newspaper article about someone online and borrowed detail from that.

Perhaps the only crime here, if crime there be, is an artistic one: the story is just a bit shallow.

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.

You can see it as a villain, but the way it is presented it does not seem Nowicki sees Roupenian as a villain (though maybe she did at one point).

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.