Comment by refulgentis
5 years ago
There's tons of ambiguity about it, hence this article and fascination with it, no? It raises the very interesting problem that literally everything about it was true, in a creepy, overly detailed way that indicates obsession, other than the horrible way it painted the man involved. Very, very, strange situation.
It ran in the Fiction section of the New Yorker. No reasonable person is confused about this.
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.
"Fiction" is literally in the word "autofiction". The term means "fictional autobiography". You may have confused it with "roman à clef", which nobody says Cat Person is. We do have a term for "fiction inspired in part by real stories"; it's "fiction".
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