Comment by tptacek

The half she kept is the identifying details other than names of the actual, real-life people she based it on - so much so that their friends immediately recognised them in the story - and the half she changed is stuff internal to their relationship that those friends would have no way of identifying as false and that seemingly fits their existing sterotype-based assumptions better than the actual reality would've.

I believe it's which half of the story she fictionalised which bothers people.

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".

> people are mad about: that her work of fiction is mostly fictional

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?

"Based on a true story."

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.

If I wrote a story about ptkecat, accurately included most of the broad details about your life, but then inserted some fictional ones that portrayed you as a lying, manipulative person, would you consider that to be fictional? Would you be unjustified in being angry about it?

Worse, she injected her own experiences/narrative into a real couple's relationship details that other people also knew about. That's probably the fiction part.

Curiously, not as strong as one might think.

"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...

Fiction uses false statements about reality in order to (attempt to) describe a deeper truth. Cat Person uses true factual details (in addition to false ones) in order to concoct a lie. In that sense, it is the opposite of our usual notion of fiction.

I can't tell if you're really mad about the article and think the author is unreasonable, or if you think I'm being unreasonable, so I'll just respond as if you're looking for evidence that this, at least somewhat, ambiguous:

> “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.

I’m not sure why you’re being downvoted. It’s true, new writers get a big leg up breaking with “based on a true story.”

"There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired", Nick thought, fictionally.