Comment by prvc
5 years ago
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 think this is one of those things that sounds clever and sort of seems like it must make sense, but on closer inspection doesn't hold together at all. As you yourself pointed out on this thread, the history of story writers incorporating the stories of real people into their work goes back centuries. Nor can a work of fiction "concoct a lie", at least beyond the sense that all fiction is a lie.
I think this is one of those threads where we're all trying to reason axiomatically about what fiction is, and it's taking us to some very weird nerd-alternate-reality places. We can just approach the problem empirically; in the 20th century alone, there are dozens of fiction writers who are famous for doing what the author of Cat Person did.