Cat Person and Me
July 8, 2021 6:36 AM Subscribe

Kristen Roupenian’s viral story draws specific details from my own life. I’ve spent the years since it published wondering: How did she know? Previously, previously, and the original, viral story.
posted by Pater Aletheias (167 comments total) 35 users marked this as a favorite

This line from the "What It Felt Like When 'Cat Person' Went Viral" really stands out now:
I was thirty-six years old and a few months into my first serious relationship with a woman, and now everyone wanted me to explain why twenty-year-old girls were having bad sex with men. I felt intensely protective of Margot, and of the readers who identified with her, and, at the same time, I felt like an impostor. I felt as though if I were truthful about who I was, I would let everyone down
posted by Pater Aletheias at 6:47 AM on July 8, 2021 [4 favorites]

I feel weird that I read this. Like, I definitely get the author's urge to write this - how fucking unsettling an experience to have. But I don't get Slate's decision to publish this. Also Cat Person itself was a story that - although very resonant in terms of the realities of gender - just didn't land for me in terms of being so - punch line focused. It makes the story even less appealing to me to learn that she left in so many specific details about a real person she didn't know. But it also seems weird to amplify this beef. I guess we might be due for a conversation about this topic - like - so much fiction leans heavily on life for its juice - but this essay doesn't seem to delve into that in a bigger-questions, philosophical kind of way. I don't know, this is weird.
posted by latkes at 7:26 AM on July 8, 2021 [7 favorites]

Really interested to see how MeFi discusses this essay, as this morning the reaction I’ve seen on Twitter was this
posted by bxvr at 7:28 AM on July 8, 2021 [5 favorites]

Yeesh. I follow a lot of writers on Twitter, and it's distressing how many of them are like "writers have no responsibilities to anyone; writing is profoundly amoral; just because a writer rips off many identifying details about your life, it doesn't mean that she's writing about you or owes you anything." And, look, I kind of get that point, but not in this case. It would have been trivially easy to change a few details and not make it so clearly inspired by Nowicki's relationship. I do think the best explanation is that Roupenian had literally no way of imagining that her story was going to go viral, and she was thinking about the story in the way that you think about something that's going to be read by the other people in your MFA fiction seminar, not in the way that you write when you think something is going to be read by millions of people. But yeah, I think there's a line between mining reality for material, which is fine, and what happened here. And maybe sometimes it's a blurry line, but I think this was pretty clearly over it.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 7:29 AM on July 8, 2021 [66 favorites]

In retrospect, I was wrong not to go back and remove those biographical details, especially the name of the town. Not doing so was careless.

It really was. Luckily, the "did you write this?" stuff Nowicki got was presumably more lighthearted from friends and acquaintances...but some of the seething manfeels-tantrum-ire that the story got could very easily have flashed over into others making the same 'conclusion' in a much more hostile way. I imagine she'll be much more careful in the future.

There's also a bit of a lesson involved in:

I’m not sure how Roupenian gleaned so much information from social media alone

...as a reminder that it's so easy for people to put much more of themselves out onto it than they realize in the doing.

On preview: especially with some authors being a bit Tra La La It's Fiction Therefore It's Okay! about it. Because of course authors are going to draw in life-details from social media just as they do from outside of it, and the truth is you can't really expect them to be less careless about particularly resonant details.
posted by Drastic at 7:32 AM on July 8, 2021 [8 favorites]

Both Courtney Milan and Jason Sanford have much more thoughtful takes on the article than that other Twitter response. I think the authorial take of "you're so vain you probably think this story is about you" implied in that first thread referenced by bxvr above is a frustrating one, and I'm glad it's not universal.
posted by ChrisR at 7:47 AM on July 8, 2021 [16 favorites]

I’m a fiction writer and I think that, yes, it’s in poor form to take so much from another person’s life. The magpie defense is that writers take details from all over. For example, one person’s hairstyle, another’s taste in formalwear, a third’s driving style, and then mixing that up with the writer’s inventions. That’s perfectly fine, if a bit gauche if the details aren’t inflected by the fiction.

However, once you take a constellation of details from one person, that human being is perfectly justified in feeling aggrieved. I thought Roupenian responded fairly well to Nowicki, and clearly understood her feelings.
posted by Kattullus at 7:52 AM on July 8, 2021 [26 favorites]

I thought this essay was fascinating, and in particular this part:

"We are all unreliable narrators. Sometimes, to my own disappointment, I find myself inclined to trust Roupenian over myself. [...] Sometimes it feels easier to believe the story that everyone knows than the one they don’t."

It's hard enough to have faith in the authenticity of your own memories when they're not mediated through someone else's interpretation of them, you know? Like I started thinking about some of the weird relationships I had as a younger person, and how hard and strange it would be if some third party wrote about them based on only superficial details.
posted by goodbyewaffles at 7:55 AM on July 8, 2021 [35 favorites]

I can sympathize that it would be weird or unpleasant to see yourself recognizably in a work of fiction. I think authors should be sensitive to that and should try to avoid causing harm, but at the same time I would argue that bringing details from real life into fiction is a fact of life and nothing described in this essay crosses an ethical line for me personally.

This essay seems to me to be still incomplete -- the author is still processing things and it might have been a better essay if revisited some time from now.
posted by Dip Flash at 7:56 AM on July 8, 2021 [3 favorites]

I'm reminded of this thing you learn in creative writing class, that you can't express the general without using the specific. There was an essay about writers block that I read where the author said something like, "If I ask my students to write about a city, they're stuck, it's too general. What about writing about this one building? Still, no, too overwhelming. A wall? No, a single brick. When I tell them to focus on a single brick then suddenly the world opens up and they have things to say."

I feel like the window dressing of this person's life was the brick that the Cat Person author focused on but Cat Person could have been written by focusing on a lot of other bricks. I mean, relationships between younger women and older, slightly entitled vaguely creepy men are not actually that unique. That's why the story didn't just capture the window dressing, it captured the dynamic. If the author of Cat Person had looked at pictures of some other couple in some other college town the same story could have emerged but with different window dressing.
posted by selfmedicating at 7:59 AM on July 8, 2021 [9 favorites]

Just a reminder that Roupenian is an active member of this community, tho prefers not to connect her real name with her screen name. But you're not only talking about a real person -- she's likely in the room.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 7:45 AM on July 8 [3 favorites −] [!]

Thanks for this reminder. Recognizing that this person is probably having a very bad day and that there's not a lot of room on the internet for people to make mistakes.

Somehow, this is related to the actual content of the linked article too. Like, we're all real people here on this earth. How we interact with each other - mediated through various forms of formal and informal publication - is just not something we've figured out well. Sometimes our mistakes our small, sometimes they are large and cause significant harms. Sometimes we double-down, sometimes we apologize. Figuring out how to do that all in the public gaze is just not something we're well equipped for.
posted by latkes at 8:04 AM on July 8, 2021 [17 favorites]

writers have no responsibilities to anyone; writing is profoundly amoral; just because a writer rips off many identifying details about your life, it doesn't mean that she's writing about you or owes you anything

Well, the first thing is the crux of the issue, right? Because the points two and three a) are definitely correct. That is, in my opinion, what pen names are for. But most people don't use them, and my understanding is the in traditional publishing (particularly for litfic) you kind of can't. So you get this sort of...vampire artist thing. Buyer beware if you're buying into a writer's life. (This is also a good reason not to date a stand up.)

FWIW I am inclined towards the "the details of this person's life were costuming" view, and that if Roupenian had a crystal ball that told her how Cat Person would blow up she would have disguised them, but while I sympathize with Nowicki's experience (and with Charles'), Cat Person went viral because it told a particular truth exceptionally well. That hasn't changed, but I'm betting the conversation around it will, now, for reasons that aren't necessarily great.
posted by schadenfrau at 8:17 AM on July 8, 2021 [3 favorites]

I feel like this was a pretty generous response to the situation. Even if I acknowledged the writer's "right" to mine things from what she saw around her, it would feel very unsettling to be on the other side of it. A few more details changed here and there and it wouldn't have been so much like a funhouse mirror. And yet, the story going viral was so unexpected. I don't feel obligated to rule in favor of one side or another. I'm just interested in thinking about the situation.
posted by PussKillian at 8:17 AM on July 8, 2021 [15 favorites]

I guess the thing is, one presumably doesn't expect to write "Cat Person" and have it go viral such that basically every single very online person has read it and therefore one probably isn't going to give as much weight to whether you should remove identifying details, perhaps set the story at a small museum in Illinois, etc.

At the same time, not mixing up the details was obviously the wrong thing to do. There is no good reason to single out an actual living person, particularly someone who isn't a public figure, and make them feel hyperscrutinized and spied upon.

More importantly, it's not the greatest idea to write what is obviously an extremely recognizable portrait of an individual and her maybe ill-advised but not abusive relationship that shades into a portrait of a creepy, scary and abusive interaction with a physically and morally repulsive person. Everyone who does not hear otherwise is going to believe that the whole thing is true and this is going to have a variety of social and possibly professional repercussions for the person in the story.

I'm not at all surprised that the subject wanted to publish something in Slate - she doesn't want people to think the story is about her actual relationship. I wouldn't either, particularly if people were going to assume that my flawed but not actually awful ex who died tragically young was actually the repulsive and cruel man in the story. Obviously, again, if you're writing a story you don't think "I'd better be scrupulously careful in my portrayal of this person because it is possible that they will die unexpectedly and tragically young and this will give weight to my story that I did not intend", but still.
posted by Frowner at 8:20 AM on July 8, 2021 [52 favorites]

I don't think there's anything inherently unethical about using the details of someone's life in fiction. However. Nowadays, to be singled out for attention of any kind, especially as a woman, especially in any way that appears to be critical of men, is far too likely to draw the hostility of the endless army of garbage young men in particular who are all too happy to swarm any target. (This is also true of marginalized groups beyond women generally, of course.) I think one has to take care to avoid doing this to private people, especially those who haven't done anything wrong. I'm not sure whether this story is over that line. I agree that the author probably didn't expect it to be some kind of viral sensation, as opposed to the usual US market short story, read by fourteen people not related to the writer or in their writing group.
posted by praemunire at 8:21 AM on July 8, 2021 [5 favorites]

The person I feel the worst for in all of this is Charles, who was a real person and who didn't deserve this. Obviously, there's more going on here than we know about it, and unless Roupenian opens up about her own relationship and interactions with Charles, we're never going to know. Still, I am sure he obsessed over every exchange he ever had with Roupenian and asked himself over and over again, "am I a creep? am I an asshole?"
posted by all about eevee at 8:22 AM on July 8, 2021 [32 favorites]

Everyone who does not hear otherwise is going to believe that the whole thing is true

I...don't generally read fiction with the expectation that it's true. Even if I recognize a real-life model. Even less so if the model is not someone from the writer's own life. Is that so unusual?
posted by praemunire at 8:27 AM on July 8, 2021 [8 favorites]

I sometimes wonder how much human misery could have been spared if Twitter had made like two or three design choices differently in 2010.
posted by theodolite at 8:31 AM on July 8, 2021 [33 favorites]

I...don't generally read fiction with the expectation that it's true.

Me either. I also don't read fiction and assume it is autobiographical. And if I never found out about Nowicki, I would have gone merrily about my way assuming that Margot and Robbie were entirely fictional creations. Now I know they are Kind of Alexis and Kind of Charles.
posted by all about eevee at 8:31 AM on July 8, 2021 [5 favorites]

The person I feel the worst for in all of this is Charles, who was a real person and who didn't deserve this. ... I am sure he obsessed over every exchange he ever had with Roupenian and asked himself over and over again, "am I a creep? am I an asshole?"

Charles was a 30-year-old man who began a flirtation with a high schooler that grew into a sexual relationship and cohabitation. If he was as decent as Nowicki says, then reading this story in the New Yorker should not have been the first time he asked himself those questions. I'm sure it hurt and that he assumed the worst when he read it, but it sounds like he was in touch with Nowicki and she assured him that the story didn't reflect their reality.

I thought Roupenian's response was good, and I empathize with Nowicki wanting to get this off her chest. I imagine a lot of men who bristled at the story will feel vindicated by Nowicki's defense of Charles, and I hope this piece doesn't trigger a new wave of hate for Roupenian.
posted by jomato at 8:51 AM on July 8, 2021 [40 favorites]

And if I never found out about Nowicki, I would have gone merrily about my way assuming that Margot and Robbie were entirely fictional creations.

It's her own call, of course, but, since (unless I missed something) she didn't end up doxxed or otherwise the center of media attention, the article has taken the situation from "some of the people who knew us both wondered if we were the models" to "nationwide, people who'd never heard of me or him before know that we are." I think I would have advised a friend against it.
posted by praemunire at 8:55 AM on July 8, 2021 [8 favorites]

I...don't generally read fiction with the expectation that it's true. Even if I recognize a real-life model. Even less so if the model is not someone from the writer's own life. Is that so unusual?

Let me try saying what I meant! "Everyone who recognizes Nowicki and Charles is going to believe that the whole thing is true unless they hear otherwise". Not, like, people who have never met any of the people involved.

But seriously, I too had a relationship with a too-old guy when I was in my late teens, and we too are still friends in a distant way. There were good things about that relationship, he treated me well, we had fun and I did learn about a lot of random "how to live in the city" stuff. I wouldn't recommend that kind of age-gap relationship, I was definitely the junior partner and I think Older Guy really should have dated People His Own Age, or at least people who were done with college. I don't think he's a hateful misogynist, he wasn't sexually selfish, etc etc; I just think that it was not as good a relationship for me as one with an age peer would have been. I'd feel pretty lousy if someone wrote a portrait that was recognizably of Too Old Guy that showed him as a predatory, rapey monster who victimized me. It was just not the greatest relationship I could have had, that's all.
posted by Frowner at 8:57 AM on July 8, 2021 [39 favorites]

I mean, the reason not to have substantial age-gap relationships isn't that every single one is traumatizing and exploitative - they are substantially unequal, frequently but by no means always predatory and reinscribe social norms about women only being desirable or valuable when young and comparatively powerless and inexperienced.
posted by Frowner at 9:00 AM on July 8, 2021 [33 favorites]

Charles was a 30-year-old man who began a flirtation with a high schooler that grew into a sexual relationship and cohabitation.

Well, this is Alexis' lived experience, not ours. If she doesn't feel traumatized or exploited, that's her journey, I guess. I did feel traumatized and exploited in my own relationships with older men when I was a teenager, but only in hindsight. I am taking Alexis at her word that she didn't feel that way. Either way, I still stand by my statement that Charles was a human being and didn't deserve to have his life mined for details for someone else's writing project. I believe that this type of "magpie-ing" is unethical, but also frustratingly common.
posted by all about eevee at 9:06 AM on July 8, 2021 [12 favorites]

But I don't get Slate's decision to publish this.

Don’t you? Because I’m sitting here thinking hooooo ly shit and I expect to see it all over Facebook and Reddit today.

she doesn't want people to think the story is about her actual relationship

But it was, and writing this essay has now informed a great many additional people about that fact.

That said what I really want to know is whether there were actually cats.
posted by bq at 9:10 AM on July 8, 2021 [17 favorites]

“When [David] moved away, Charles and I adopted two cats from the humane society—Mochi and Apricot.”
posted by mbrubeck at 9:12 AM on July 8, 2021 [5 favorites]

Thank you! I missed it in my greedy read!
posted by bq at 9:12 AM on July 8, 2021

I did not realize that "Cat Person" was an MFA class assignment story. I am thinking now of an essay I wrote in an MFA class that I was very proud of, that I wanted to publish, all about my hometown -- and not, I can assure you, about middle-class relationship anomie. There was an actual public crime in it. First off, I asked for general advice about it from someone close to the town.

Don't publish it, I was told; they will sue you.

How can they do that? I said. It's a matter of public record. It was in the news. It was in a court opinion.

The answer was: that's true, but they'll sue you anyway.

And they had reason to know. So I didn't; and I don't plan to. It was not the first or the last writing decision I have made to CMA. I am sitting on an entire novel that I could have published but was advised not to, and, since I do not wish to be an asshole and/or Twitter's main character, I have not.

It's no fun, man. When I was young, I thought that writers were meant to be daring, and that anyone that got mad at a writer was self-evidently wrong, as dumb as the censors who used to ban in Boston. But then, when I was young, writers were effectively gate-kept. You couldn't publish at 10 and see your life changed by 12. Roupenian saw that happen on a large scale, but it happens on smaller scales all the time -- scholarly articles, memoir essays, even Facebook posts that say too much. It's a live issue, and I have no quick solutions, except to attempt every day not to be an asshole.
posted by Countess Elena at 9:12 AM on July 8, 2021 [17 favorites]

The reason "Cat Person" went viral is because the dynamic of a man who can't relate to women his own age dating much younger women instead is so instantly recognizable to so many people. The things that really make the story compelling feel more like they come from Roupenian's relationship with Charles. She took details from his relationship with Alexis to flesh out the story, but mostly just details about Charles, not Alexis. Authors have used the detritus of shitty relationships in their work since.....forever? I'm sorry that Charles died and that Alexis found herself in this situation, but it still feels mostly like Roupenian is telling her own story, not Alexis's.
posted by cakelite at 9:13 AM on July 8, 2021 [10 favorites]

Well, she used details about Alexis including her relationship dynamics, her hometown, her place of employment, her job title, her school, the details of her first with Charles, and her pets. That seems like a lot to me.
posted by all about eevee at 9:20 AM on July 8, 2021 [39 favorites]

I don't buy that because Roupenian didn't know the story would go viral, this somehow excuses the deliberate use of identifiable details of Nowicki's life. She sent the story to the New Yorker. You send a story to the New Yorker wishing it to be seen by millions, wishing it to be the thing that puts you in the spotlight.

This whole episode made me think of a personal example. A relative of mine had a terrible experience in her youth, she was the victim of a forced abortion. Years later she met the same person in a different context and was forced to reconcile or lose something of great value. When I first heard of this, I thought it would make for a compelling short story plot. So the question was should I use it? I haven't decided one way or another. If I do write it I would change the details so much that she would feel safe in the possibility that it is fiction.

This is not to claim any virtue on my part, but the intensity with which I thought about this and the attraction of my relative's story made me realize something: We writers are predators and we need to be wary of our appetites.
posted by storybored at 9:20 AM on July 8, 2021 [21 favorites]

One thing that also struck me about this story is that her relationship with Charles was so disconcerting to other people that she lost roommate opportunities and they were compelled to spend time in another city where nobody knew who they were. I recall all kinds of bizarre and dysfunctional relationships among my college classmates, including big age gaps, but none that led to that kind of ostracization. College students are not particularly judgmental about dysfunctional relationships. It makes me wonder what else people were picking up on about Charles.
posted by cakelite at 9:21 AM on July 8, 2021 [28 favorites]

Did she borrow from Alexis's relationship dynamics with Charles, or did she happen to experience similar dynamics in her relationship with him? The whole reason this story resonated is that many, many people have dated someone like Charles, who is older than you, teases you a lot and woos you with a superior taste in things like music and movies.
posted by cakelite at 9:24 AM on July 8, 2021 [9 favorites]

But Roupenian wasn't much younger than Charles when they dated, right? That part of the dynamic was from Alexis' relationship, not her own.
posted by BungaDunga at 9:32 AM on July 8, 2021 [7 favorites]

There's a reason that movies have that disclaimer at the end in the credits, something to the effect of "Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental." If the core of the story is about an extremely common, recognizable relationship between an older guy and a younger woman, then you shouldn't need to mine real peoples' lives for specific, identifiable details to flesh it out (I mean, seriously: physical appearance, attire, home decor), you can should be able to just invent those details.

To her credit, Roupenian seems to have recognized this:

In retrospect, I was wrong not to go back and remove those biographical details, especially the name of the town. Not doing so was careless.

But I am kind of flabbergasted by the number of people here and on Twitter (Summer Brennan! She's usually great! I expect so much better from her) who apparently think this sort of thing is totally fine.
posted by mstokes650 at 9:34 AM on July 8, 2021 [12 favorites]

I believe that this type of "magpie-ing" is unethical, but also frustratingly common.

I think that points towards the real value of the essay (and really hope Nowicki doesn't regret having it published from its own larger-attention effects). There's real value in taking hard looks at common modes of behavior and the externalities that can arise from them. To get...meta...about it (sorry), there's any number of metatalk threads about unintended harm effects of common rhetorical language use, and it bears that same real value in really examining and thinking about things that likely aren't much reflected on in the moments.
posted by Drastic at 9:40 AM on July 8, 2021 [15 favorites]

Did she borrow from Alexis's relationship dynamics with Charles, or did she happen to experience similar dynamics in her relationship with him?

According to Nowicki, Roupenian was not much younger than Charles. So yeah, she borrowed that from the relationship he had with Alexis.
posted by all about eevee at 9:43 AM on July 8, 2021

Also, I meant "first date" above. I left out a word. Sorry.
posted by all about eevee at 9:43 AM on July 8, 2021

There's a reason that movies have that disclaimer at the end in the credits, something to the effect of "Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Yeah, I was also thinking that. And the origin of the disclaimer, is because in the film Rasputin and the Empress it's implied Rasputin raped Princess Natasha (not the real name of the actual princess who sued), when this didn't happen.

But the reason I didn't bring that up, was because I thought before a story or movie is made there's a lawyer that would read through it first to make sure it's okay. Am I wrong?

This story got into the New Yorker, I would be amazed if no one thought to check at least.
posted by FJT at 9:44 AM on July 8, 2021 [1 favorite]

I do enjoy the writers that are normally the most outspoken SJW types ready to wave the bloody shirt and go to internet war with Twitter's Main Character suddenly pivoting to "ACTUALLY sweaty its called FICTION and us WRITERS can do whatever we WANT it's called ART!" when it's them seeing some internet blowback.
posted by Ghostride The Whip at 9:46 AM on July 8, 2021 [13 favorites]

I dated an older man when I was in my early twenties and it was a pretty messy, dramatic and dysfunctional situation. I'm trying to put myself in the author's shoes, and if someone wrote a story about my ex that incorporated details about me and our relationship dynamic I would probably die of humiliation, so I do understand where she is coming from. It just is unfortunate, because I think Roupenian's story mostly works because of her astute understanding of this kind of man and what it is like to date him, not because she borrowed details from someone else's relationship.
posted by cakelite at 9:49 AM on July 8, 2021 [8 favorites]

More importantly, it's not the greatest idea to write what is obviously an extremely recognizable portrait of an individual and her maybe ill-advised but not abusive relationship that shades into a portrait of a creepy, scary and abusive interaction with a physically and morally repulsive person. ... I'm not at all surprised that the subject wanted to publish something in Slate - she doesn't want people to think the story is about her actual relationship.

Exactly this. The harm done is that Alexis has lost control over her story. Her version, the non-fictional version, is permanently stamped over both in her own mind and those who know her. And the fictional version recasts a loving relationship as abuse. Who wants to receive a flood of text messages from acquaintances going "Hey I heard about you being abused," whether or not it's true, anyway?

(The story does something similar to Charles too, to the extent that even in this thread people are using things the character based on him did as dispositive evidence of what he did.)

It's unsurprising of course for some writers to come out in strident defense of this behavior. If writing from life is your bread and butter, you don't want your practices to be subject to moral scrutiny. (Who wants their practices to be subject to moral scrutiny?) Defending this somewhat extreme example of stealing real-life details draws a bright line that protects less extreme practices.

And, yeah, writers should be able to adapt details from life. Where else are you supposed to get details? But unfortunately there's no blanket exception to "You have to care about the impact your actions have on other people", even for writers. If you hurt someone making your art, then you hurt someone full stop. If you think the ends justify the means, then you'll have to have that conversation.

Lots of writers do hurt their subjects. Apparently a lot of Knausgard's family are pissed off at him for writing about them. This is one of the subjects of his books I guess, part of the art. In at least one sense, then, the art wouldn't exist without the harm. But even so I don't think this allows us to morally discount the harm. Harm is harm. Perhaps your artistic perspective is one in which harm is a matter of forensic interest, and not of moral concern. Perhaps there is even some value in your artistic perspective. Still you can't call on us to suspend morality for you, to say that hurting someone simply doesn't matter.
posted by grobstein at 9:53 AM on July 8, 2021 [38 favorites]

It's her own call, of course, but, since (unless I missed something) she didn't end up doxxed or otherwise the center of media attention, the article has taken the situation from "some of the people who knew us both wondered if we were the models" to "nationwide, people who'd never heard of me or him before know that we are." I think I would have advised a friend against it.

This. Nowicki has chosen to link her own story to Cat Person in a way that just wouldn't have happened otherwise. I also have sympathy for Charles's grieving mother, who now may be dealing with the fallout from Nowicki's piece, which adds details that make him much more identifiable and can't be dismissed as fiction. Even though Nowicki speaks more positively of Charles, his mother now knows that he was the inspiration for the man in Cat Person.
posted by FencingGal at 10:01 AM on July 8, 2021 [5 favorites]

Something like this happened to me when I was quite young, maybe 23 or 24.
An at the time locally semi-famous author wrote a novel based on my life, but of all the inner life and the details of my private life she based on her own feelings at a previous time. There was the relationship with an older man. The model on the cover even looked like me. I didn't mind much, until I once gave a lecture on my work, and a student stood up and asked if I was the model for that fictional character. Then it hit me like a concrete wall that everyone who had read that book would assume that the thoughts and feelings and rather flamboyant sex life were all mine. And I was angry with the author for years and years, because she, as the professional, should have known that would happen. A huge difference between the two experiences is that she asked me beforehand if it was OK, and I have learnt since that she always does this, which I think is cool.

That said, I have a friend who writes outrageous autofiction. Any details will get their name out here and very rapidly also mine, and while I trust most people who are commenting on the blue, one has know idea who else is reading. I have all of that friend's books, and I haven't read one for ages, because I'm scared I am in there, but I don't mind if I'm in there. I haven't asked and they haven't told. I just don't want to read it. I guess the difference between the two stories is my age. The first time I was still insecure of my own identity and how to understand my personal history and relied a lot on feed-back from others. I still have all sorts of issues about being me, but I don't worry much about what strangers imagine about me. I am not ready to read what my friend imagines about me. Maybe I will be one day.

Does anyone remember Åsne Seierstad and her book The Bookseller of Kabul? At the time at least, I felt the book was exploitative, though it was also deeply fascinating.
posted by mumimor at 10:01 AM on July 8, 2021 [21 favorites]

But the reason I didn't bring that up, was because I thought before a story or movie is made there's a lawyer that would read through it first to make sure it's okay. Am I wrong?

This story got into the New Yorker, I would be amazed if no one thought to check at least.

Negative checking does get done in some circumstances, where there's an easy collection of facts to check against, like court/criminal records (or, for another example: do NOT make up a title for a peer of the British aristocracy without checking to see if it's actually real first, because there are a lot of weird old British titles still kicking around out there and some of the holders of those titles are Google-proficient and quite tetchy), but for something like this? How would a lawyer (or any random stranger working at the New Yorker) even check it? What would they check for? Short of strapping the author to a lie-detector and asking, "Is this person a composite of fictional details and real-life details from different sources, or did all these details about this person come from the same, actual living person?" there's really nothing you can rely on except the author's word that their fiction is fiction.
posted by mstokes650 at 10:16 AM on July 8, 2021 [7 favorites]

Also, my husband has an ex girlfriend who has written reams of poems and fiction that is obviously about him and published all of it on a public Tumblr. I'm even a character in some of the pieces. Yes, it's weird, but also it's his ex's way of processing and working out her life

I've been here as well, in the pre-internet era: I went on a handful of dates with a woman, but the relationship meant much more to her. She felt that I had betrayed her particular ways, and she got up on stage at a big-deal annual lesbian arts festival and read a piece that was obviously about me. I left the room. It was a good reminder that sometimes you just have to let go of the stories other people are telling about you.

I also, once, had a story go viral that I had expected not to. I wrote about my son, and I had promised him that it was being published in a place where it would be seen by hundreds, at most about 1500, people, all of them Quakers. He was OK with it, especially when we heard from the mom of a young trans boy in Australia (we live in Michigan, and my partner and I are both Michigan alums, Go Blue) saying that her son had really loved the story.

I did use a pseudonym for my son, but I might not have attached his photo to the piece if I'd known how widely it was going to be read.

Anyway. I think both these writers have acted in good faith. The author of "Cat People" seems to recognize her mis-steps and to feel regret, and the author of this essay is open to a generous reading of the situation, even as it's painful.

I once saw an Irish storyteller tell a very dramatic story of her father being shot in their home, in front of her and the other children. The thing is, she told the story very badly, and it rankled me, so I went home and re-wrote it. I never published my version, though I think I performed it on stage a few times. I don't think I have a copy of it anymore, unless it's saved on some floppy disk from 1991 that's languishing in a box somewhere.

I borrowed her story, and her botched telling of it, as a writing exercise. I'm not sure what my point is, except that it's easy to get excited by a story that inspires you, even if it's somebody else's story.
posted by Orlop at 10:32 AM on July 8, 2021 [21 favorites]

It seems like Roupenian's biggest mistake was being a young, relatively unproven writer who probably lacked confidence in her work and so left in details that a more experienced and confident writer would have transformed; she wanted her story to feel "real" and didn't trust that it would without those concrete, true-to-life details.

I...don't generally read fiction with the expectation that it's true. Even if I recognize a real-life model. Even less so if the model is not someone from the writer's own life. Is that so unusual?

I automatically assume that fiction is based on true-life, but only non-realistic fiction. Roupenian's "Cat Person"? Obviously didn't really happen. However, Paul Schrader's Cat People? Yeah, that is all true, his high school girlfriend totally turned into a tiger or some shit. The Marvel films are basically documentaries.
posted by Saxon Kane at 10:33 AM on July 8, 2021 [11 favorites]

Cat people is adapted from the 1942 movie of the same name.
posted by brujita at 10:53 AM on July 8, 2021 [1 favorite]

I've been here as well, in the pre-internet era: I went on a handful of dates with a woman, but the relationship meant much more to her. She felt that I had betrayed her particular ways, and she got up on stage at a big-deal annual lesbian arts festival and read a piece that was obviously about me. I left the room. It was a good reminder that sometimes you just have to let go of the stories other people are telling about you.

My husband did push back exactly once on the Tumblr. Once, when we were dating, we went to a new restaurant in our area for a date. Unbeknownst to us, the ex had a serving job at the restaurant. She didn't wait on us, but she wrote a poem on the Tumblr about how much we had hurt her by eating there and detailed the food we ordered and the clothing we were wearing. A mutual friend of the ex and my husband sent him a link to the Tumblr and it felt like A Big Deal. Husband messaged ex and asked her to refrain from further poetry. She wrote back and shared a quote from Charles Bukowski about great writers being indecent people, and the stories and poems continued. Over time, we stopped looking at the blog. It felt weird and dramatic and violating at first, but now with age and distance I feel like she was processing her normal feelings of sadness and wistfulness about a situation that was awkward and stressful for her. She's a human being and she's allowed to be messy and feel her feelings in strange ways.

But again, this little Tumblr blog wasn't a viral sensation like Cat People was. Kristen, Charles, and Alexis are all humans too. I guess I feel sorry for all of them.
posted by all about eevee at 10:53 AM on July 8, 2021 [5 favorites]

I think it's good to remember that the situation we're in as a species is completely unprecedented for the electrical meat rivers in our skulls to process. We are all actually just figuring shit out as we go.

Also one thing about this that's pretty interesting to me is I remember the conversation on here when the original story came out and I think the reason it went viral in the first place is because so many people had experiences just like this one and could see themselves in the story, especially regarding the sex scene. It's like we were all like we all had this uncomfortable experience in our past that we didn't know how to talk about until someone described it in this particular way that unlocked it for us, and we really needed it. So I'm glad the story was written and I'm glad people appreciated it for what it was. The details could have been elided a bit more but everyone makes mistakes. There is no way to survive on earth among humans without drama and mistakes.
posted by bleep at 10:55 AM on July 8, 2021 [22 favorites]

Cat people is adapted from the 1942 movie of the same name.

Yeah well it keeps happening!
posted by Saxon Kane at 10:57 AM on July 8, 2021 [11 favorites]

the story was so upsetting to me that i teared up and felt physically ill for some reason. i can't properly articulate why, or even figure out what i feel. i'll have to sit on it and think before composing an adequate response. i'll have to re-read Cat Person too. i like(d?) the story, and it rang true to me in many ways, but it had a certain kind of moral didacticism to it that is, in my opinion, unbecoming of serious literature.

the fact that some white ivy league MFA lady raised by a doctor got rich and famous off of this while causing such clear and demonstrable harm to others is deeply unsettling.

the kinds of comments i'm seeing here and elsewhere are just adding to the existential unease. sure, the comments here are different than, say, what the angry men on twitter are saying. but they're no less disconcerting.

i think i'm done with the culture. i will, of course, keep reading, for it is the only thing that keeps me sane. but i think i'm finally done with contemporary culture.

i just bought patricia lockwood's new book, but i think i'm going to stick to non-Anglophone literature preferably written by dead people from now on.

i don't know why, but this has hurt my soul
posted by davedave at 11:04 AM on July 8, 2021 [5 favorites]

My guess is that Roupenian dated Charles, learned he had been in a long term relationship with a high schooler turned undergrad, found that detail insightful to her own interactions with Charles and maybe earlier relationships of her own with men old enough to know better. Wrote a story processing these things. And hit the nail on the head of describing a common experience that rang true to many people.

I will say that a person can have a sketch age inappropriate relationship as a young person, recognize the not great aspects of that after the fact and still really really not want to publicly discuss those not great things because it will make the person who should have known better look bad. That person might even reassure the older person who knew better and now feels guilty that really no it's fine we're good. As they do their own internal grappling with the not great stuff and their own sense of agency.
posted by mandymanwasregistered at 11:11 AM on July 8, 2021 [11 favorites]

Me a little while ago: "Oh, 'Cat Person' ... Hm--is the essay title an 'It me' kind of hyperbole?"

Me more recently: "I wonder how many English profs are thinking right now about organizing an edited volume of essays"
posted by Wobbuffet at 11:15 AM on July 8, 2021 [1 favorite]

Years ago, a musician friend asked me to write the lyrics for a folk song he was going to sing at a gathering of a group, and I took the tune and some very mild drama that I knew of in the group, plus a few random jokes, and wrote the lyrics. It was only when he began to sing that he realized that, just by chance, I had, in ignorance, written something that might have, with a very uncharitable reading, been construed as an attack on one of the senior members. Fortunately, she recognized as a bunch of general silliness and laughed. I can only imagine what would have happened if I had deliberately minded more “real gossip….”
posted by GenjiandProust at 11:15 AM on July 8, 2021 [2 favorites]

the fact that some white ivy league MFA lady raised by a doctor got rich and famous off of this while causing such clear and demonstrable harm to others is deeply unsettling.

Oh god, not this again. I am so fucking sick of Metafilter selectively using allegations of privilege to discredit young women, in ways that we basically never do for men. Also, if you're a dude and you found Cat People made you uncomfortable or seemed unbecoming or whatever, you might sit for a minute or two with the thought that maybe what makes you uncomfortable is women talking openly about the way we experience dealing with creepy men.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 11:17 AM on July 8, 2021 [62 favorites]

Just a reminder that Roupenian surely was harassed for the original story (she is a woman, in public, after all). This article will probably invite more hate mail, for both Roupenian and Nowicki. Can we try to avoid dragging these two women further?
posted by tofu_crouton at 11:21 AM on July 8, 2021 [14 favorites]

no matter how demonstrably harmful it is

If anything, Nowicki's essay does a nice job of demonstrating how useless these weaponized accusations of "harm" really are--accusations that have been deployed over and over in this thread, leaving aside whatever's going on over on Twitter.

Her essay was uncomfortable and thought-provoking, but what it wasn't, was an exhortation that she had been Harmed and thus needed the internet to do anything about it. And by writing the essay, she took ownership of the situation--she does not need one other person in the entire world getting angry about it on her behalf. Nobody needs to call anybody out, nobody needs to do anything. This being the internet, of course, no one can pass up the opportunity to go on the attack, so maybe we can watch another promising young writer have their careers absolutely destroyed. Then finally there will be justice in the world.

God, I can't even manage sarcasm, this Demonstrable Harm discourse gets under my skin so badly. It's an idea that, once invoked, allows all manner of nastiness to seem morally justified. We're not required to react to something, you know? Especially when we know--we KNOW, because we have heard this story over and over--that that reaction will invariably do more harm than whatever the original sin was.
posted by mittens at 11:29 AM on July 8, 2021 [46 favorites]

There are some things that need neither be condemned nor defended. Or they can be mildly condemned without a giant flaming Twitter pile-on. Harms can be acknowledged to specific people without necessarily making this about large groups.

I don't know if Metafilter can/will do that any more though. And perhaps many Mefites think we oughtn't to.

What does Metafilter generally do in its threads? The Metafilter Commenters take specific real incidents about specific real individuals, and then use them to make points about Larger Society. I do this! I don't think it's wrong or immoral, I don't think it's like-writing-that-story, I don't even think it's a useless sort of discourse; and of course no one here's getting money or fame.

However the "let's also make this about Larger Issues", "let's also make this about what Society Allows People" type of conversation gets things extremely heated. We're no longer talking about the specific actions of specific individuals, or the specific experiences of specific individuals, we're talking about Free Speech and Multiple Privileges and Artistic Freedom and Responsibility and Media Attention and Death of the Author and all these other positions that we have to defend or attack or whatnot.
posted by Hypatia at 11:30 AM on July 8, 2021 [5 favorites]

I think the magpie analogy is a bad fit. A magpie steals a shiny thing from here and a sparkly thing from there and combines them into a big (new) pile of shiny things. If a magpie took everything from your house, piece by piece and recreated your house -- but with a murder dungeon -- that would be a whole other thing.

OK, to change the analogy a little, a set designer wants an authentic 1970s living room and so uses pictures of your friend's childhood home and recreates it -- furniture, wall decor, carpets, knick-knacks.. You recognize the home as theirs, instantly. Everyone who went to their home in the 70s recognizes that it was that family's house. At one point in the movie, a character opens the door next to the kitchen and goes down to the basement. Would it be unreasonable for you -- who had never opened that door -- to think that the door by the kitchen in your friend's childhood home led to the basement? For all the people saying "well fiction is fiction there's no reason people should believe it" wouldn't you -- without ever even thinking it through -- forevermore assume the door by your childhood friend's kitchen was the door to the basement. And sure, maybe it wasn't. Maybe it's a pantry. And one day your friend told you "no, that was the pantry," you'd accept that, sure but it would it be reasonable for your friend to say "Why would you have thought it was the basement?? Obviously that was a movie set, not my actual house, even if it was just BASED on my actual house."

I think Roupenian made a mistake, but I can see how it could happen and she never stopped to think about it and I think she sees that and feels bad about it, and there's not much to do about it now. But I think it's disingenuous to think this doesn't paint Charles unfairly (according to Nowicki) in a bad light because people should know it was fiction. If the whole house is obviously based on a real house, why would you think that one door was wrong?
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 11:33 AM on July 8, 2021 [17 favorites]

Kind of crazy reading all the comments in here searching for ways to re-insinuate that Charles was a bad guy, when TFA is about a person who dated him who said that he was specifically a good guy, or at least not the kind of Bad Guy that "Cat Person" made him out to be.
posted by Cpt. The Mango at 11:34 AM on July 8, 2021 [21 favorites]

If a magpie took everything from your house, piece by piece and recreated your house -- but with a murder dungeon -- that would be a whole other thing.

If nothing else, a movie pitch that deserves greenlighting!
posted by Drastic at 11:39 AM on July 8, 2021 [27 favorites]

Kind of [weird] reading all the comments in here searching for ways to… foreground the men in the story and condemn the women.
posted by ambrosen at 11:49 AM on July 8, 2021 [7 favorites]

One of the things that irks me about this thing is how people keep wanting to make it into a conversation about What Is the Nature of Art? or Is There Even Really Such a Thing As Fiction? and (to blatantly plagiarize a great line from the essay linked at the bottom of this comment) "the conversation spirals out from here in unending loops, repeating drunken rants of MFA cohorts eternally throughout the ages." (Summer Brennan is now bringing up thinkpieces about the tragic backlash to Isabel Fall's story to try and steer the conversation towards how Art Should Be Understood, and I just couldn't even, and had to unfollow her. Sigh.) All this when it is really just a pretty simple, clear-cut case of a writer not removing/changing enough details to anonymize the people in the story, which is a simple technical writing mistake and has nothing really to do with The Philosophy of Art.

Cat Person was a good story! But it still would've been a good story if the main character came from a different hometown, went to a different college, and dated a guy who was a mishmash of characteristics taken from a number of different 30-something white dudes, instead of all being taken from the same specific 30-something white dude. There's no need for the story to be so personal about two real people that one of them got texts from former co-workers asking her if she'd written it, in order for it to be just as effective a piece of art. I'm not saying that's bad, or evil, or even automatically harmful, it's just...a mistake. Like a typo or a run-on sentence, except it's not something an editor can catch. So the conversations about The Nature of Art are all kind of misguided, and a lot of them read to me as people using this faintly-related situation to talk about...whatever aspects of Art they really wanted to talk about. Which I suppose is what happens most of the time anyways, so maybe I should just reach acceptance about it and move on, and if the Bad Takes machine weren't in such rare form today I probably would have without a word.

But since it seems we're going to get a raft of thinkpieces about Art out of this anyways, I will post this one, that I found interesting and thought-provoking about the issue it wants to discuss, even if I disagree with her notion that the issue she wanted to talk about is also The Real Issue at the heart of this mess: morality dysmorphia
posted by mstokes650 at 11:51 AM on July 8, 2021 [28 favorites]

An at the time locally semi-famous author wrote a novel based on my life, but of all the inner life and the details of my private life she based on her own feelings at a previous time. There was the relationship with an older man.

After I wrote this and more above, I was inspired to do a bit of googling. Because of my anger, I have not since read anything that now internationally famous author wrote or followed her in the media or on social media. And now I realize that she probably, intuitively, understood something about me that I didn't when she chose me as the model for her character. I can see now that I was going through a thing she had experienced earlier. She used me as the model because she wanted to move her own story to a different setting, and we had met through mutual friends. But in reality, there were some likenesses that I don't think she or I were consciously aware of, but that she as the (slightly) older of us may have sensed.
Truth is a weird thing. After today's reading and discussion, I think maybe the woman who wrote about "me" really did write about me, because she saw her younger self in me. Even though I didn't see it at the time. I'm aware some above have already suggested this, but I'd like to comment from the point of view of a personal experience.
posted by mumimor at 11:51 AM on July 8, 2021 [20 favorites]

What is the nature of art? is such an interesting thing to think about though. I almost never stop thinking about this to tell the truth.
posted by bleep at 11:56 AM on July 8, 2021 [2 favorites]

Am I completely off base to read the article as hinting that Charles' death was a suicide/drug overdose potentially brought on by the stress of the story-about-you-being-terrible-goes-viral situation?
posted by hermanubis at 11:58 AM on July 8, 2021 [7 favorites]

I think we are not told how Charles died and it's not appropriate to be speculating. I think even if that reading were accurate, the author does not tell us that because she doesn't want us going down that road.
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 12:03 PM on July 8, 2021 [37 favorites]

the fact that some white ivy league MFA lady raised by a doctor got rich and famous off of this while causing such clear and demonstrable harm to others is deeply unsettling.

Whatever else she's done, you cannot reduce Roupenian to a pile of chunky jewelry like this. There's such a thing as misogyny under the guise of intersectionality.

As for "rich and famous," it's not that clear. She was probably paid a nice amount by contemporary writer standards for the movie rights and her book, which wasn't well reviewed, but it's a one-time strike, unless she has another score that she works hard for. And as for fame, she'll lose that too, again, unless she continues to work hard.

Incidentally, who believes that dead authors who didn't write in English were any nicer than this?
posted by Countess Elena at 12:10 PM on July 8, 2021 [46 favorites]

Do MFAs talk about the real-world consequences of writing from life? Maybe they should.
posted by nat at 12:15 PM on July 8, 2021 [4 favorites]

Also, about the literary merits of autofiction. It is not at all a recent development and it is certainly here to stay. So is using "true stories" that the author has heard or read about as the inspiration for fiction. I'm not entirely comfortable with these facts, but I am not going to argue with them, since in my opinion, it would be like arguing with the ocean. One cannot stop it.
posted by mumimor at 12:15 PM on July 8, 2021 [1 favorite]

> Do MFAs talk about the real-world consequences of writing from life?

Yes, in my experience. I got my MFA in non-fiction writing when everyone was writing memoirs, so we spent a lot of time discussing what was ours to publish and what should be written down and left in a drawer. This was one million years ago, but I presume they still have the same discussions (even in the fiction program).
posted by The corpse in the library at 12:22 PM on July 8, 2021 [6 favorites]

Seems to me that sufficient detail was lifted directly from Nowicki's life that her own acquaintances recognized her, specifically in the story. So it's pretty clear that the resemblance to a person living, and a person dead, was not coincidental.

Feeling a bit bad about how things played out is a good thing. Feeling a bit bad and giving Nowicki and the family of "Charles" at least some some symbolic share of the income generated by the story of their own actual relationship would be better.
posted by tclark at 12:25 PM on July 8, 2021 [11 favorites]

This is also a story, I should add, that could be construed as libelous against Charles -- especially because identifying him from his fictionalized stand-in was so easy for people who knew them.
posted by tclark at 12:33 PM on July 8, 2021 [11 favorites]

Could you first do an accounting of all the terrible white men who have done this and worse over the years and then maybe we can get to pretending to understand the law of defamation? Thanks.
posted by sinfony at 12:42 PM on July 8, 2021 [6 favorites]

I think it should be done, and done in a thread about the accounting of all the terrible white men who have done this and worse over the years, rather than a thread about a story where enough details were lifted from actual life to specifically identify a man who, in this specific instance, has been explicitly described in the article by Alexis Nowicki as having not committed anything like "this and worse."
posted by tclark at 12:48 PM on July 8, 2021 [12 favorites]

Another week, another female author getting dragged on the internet again about her breakout story that she already got harassed about years ago when it first came out because she incorrectly adhered to unwritten rules about the right way to write and publish fiction.
posted by momus_window at 12:51 PM on July 8, 2021 [20 favorites]

What are everyone's favorite works of fiction whose energy and genius derive in part from how they use real life people and events in a way that is somewhere between careless and cruel? Mine would include The Sun Also Rises, The Pursuit of Love, maybe Lucky Jim. I've been told that Zadie Smith's On Beauty has some sharply drawn portraits in it for people who know the originals. A non-satirical case might be Death in Venice.

And what are notable precedents for what Nowicki does here, publicly protesting against or at least commenting on the way her life is used in someone else's fiction?
posted by sy at 1:19 PM on July 8, 2021

Okay but also, I just realized it would be pretty easy for someone to figure out who Charles actually is if they did some Internet sleuthing, so hasn't Alexis just done what Roupenian did to someone else, except worse, and way more obvious? Is Roupenian supposed to be more careful with ethics than Nowicki? Is it okay to basically reveal Charles' identity via his connection to Nowicki because he's dead?
posted by all about eevee at 1:21 PM on July 8, 2021 [2 favorites]

Also also, it is obvious that Charles told Kristin all about Alexis, so shouldn't Alexis be mad at...Charles?
posted by all about eevee at 1:24 PM on July 8, 2021 [12 favorites]

I do this thing, maybe a lot of people do it, where I try to guess the twist before it happens, and I was sure the twist was that Kristen Roupenian was Charles/Robert. That would've been interesting.

It occurs to me that "live your life as if someone will use the details for a thinly-veiled roman a clef" is not a horrible principle.
posted by kevinbelt at 1:26 PM on July 8, 2021 [7 favorites]

Okay but also, I just realized it would be pretty easy for someone to figure out who Charles actually is if they did some Internet sleuthing, so hasn't Alexis just done what Roupenian did to someone else, except worse, and way more obvious?

No. It is not immoral to tell your own story, and it’s definitely not immoral to say “that famous story was definitely lifted in part from my life, except the real Charles was kind and considerate to me.”

Also also, it is obvious that Charles told Kristin all about Alexis, so shouldn't Alexis be mad at...Charles?

People get to talk to their friends and lovers about previous relationships. You can always tell your story. But if that friend of your old lover then takes that story, publishes it with all the identifying details intact, except she makes it darker and worse, that’s a violation. It’s not the worst thing ever, and everyone directly involved seems to be pretty sensible about it, but it’s a violation.
posted by Pater Aletheias at 1:45 PM on July 8, 2021 [44 favorites]

Phew, relieved to see discussion on this here on Mefi away from the Twitter gang (who I often like! and sometimes agree with!).

There's so much thought-provoking stuff in all of this, and for me I'm most struck at the moment by what I feel is an author's right vs an author's responsibility.

Like, I do think it is my right as a creator to take details of every story and life I've ever known and to mash them together in an effort to entertain, shock, or educate myself. It might be immensely healing or relevant (or fun or surprising or touching) to take a portrait of Man I Had a Generally Fine Relationship With and then to put into his mouth The One Worst Thing That Other Guy Ever Said To Me. And I feel fiercely protective of my, and every writer's, right to do that in their work.

But, I also think, when there is an wisp of a chance that your fiction will have a reach broader than your MFA class, or your writer's circle, or whatnot, that it's your ethical obligation to scrupulously go through and make sure that you have sufficiently disguised people so that, even if they may recognize themselves ("I did say that awful thing to you!") they wouldn't be recognized by their families, friends, and coworkers. I do think that's the responsibility of a writer.

All in all I find this whole thing fascinating, and the discourse around it has dipped between fascinating and disappointing, and I'm so glad I just re-read Trust Exercise this summer.

On further reading, what grobstein said:

And, yeah, writers should be able to adapt details from life. Where else are you supposed to get details? But unfortunately there's no blanket exception to "You have to care about the impact your actions have on other people", even for writers. If you hurt someone making your art, then you hurt someone full stop. If you think the ends justify the means, then you'll have to have that conversation.

And at the same time, speaking to this particular story, I'd like to +1 this from mittens:

If anything, Nowicki's essay does a nice job of demonstrating how useless these weaponized accusations of "harm" really are--accusations that have been deployed over and over in this thread, leaving aside whatever's going on over on Twitter. Her essay was uncomfortable and thought-provoking, but what it wasn't, was an exhortation that she had been Harmed and thus needed the internet to do anything about it.

posted by Zephyrial at 1:52 PM on July 8, 2021 [17 favorites]

Personally, I don't take away from this that either the original author, nor the author of this essay, meant to do harm.
But I do wonder if the New Yorker had some culpability here; surely they don't want to harm someone by the fiction they publish. So what duty did they have to explicitly give the author space to anonymize details to avoid that harm, once the story was accepted for publication? Or, if the story did come out of a piece for the MFA, if any prof suggested that she submit for publication, what duty did that prof have to say "hey you may need to edit for anonymity"?

It's a big jump from "only read by other MFAers" to "read in the New Yorker" (and another still for the viral nature of this piece, but no one could have foreseen that).

Of course I'm not a literary writer, so I have no idea; maybe these steps already happen and yet somehow this story slipped through with its non-anonymous nature (which it seems like both the original author and the author of this new essay regret).
posted by nat at 2:03 PM on July 8, 2021 [2 favorites]

mumimor: Also, about the literary merits of autofiction. It is not at all a recent development and it is certainly here to stay.

I think the moral quandaries raised by Nowicki’s essay are different from autofiction, but it’s certainly worth thinking about in this context.

The problem with autofiction, especially the Nordic/Anglophone genre (the French genre of autofiction seems different to me, with a focus on ironic detachment, but I’m no expert), is that it’s an attempt to mash together the creative freedom of fiction, with the moral authority of testimony.

The power of fiction is that the reader is given a glimpse into a world that feels like it extends far beyond the boundaries of the text, peopled with characters with full lives.

The power of testimony is that a single person gives witness to what they have experienced.

The world in a work of autofiction, however, ends at the boundaries of the text, because outside the text there is only the reality of what happened.

However, it isn’t testimony, because enough details have been changed, and the reader can’t know what’s been changed, that the reader has no way of assessing the truth of what’s been told.

So you end up with two dimensional fiction, which might or might not be lying about recognizable real events and people.

With Cat Person, the problem is that traces of reality have scratched the fiction, giving one part of the story a backstory from reality. It’s a less odious version of finding out that an unpleasant character in a novel is based on a critic that gave the author’s previous book a less than glowing review.
posted by Kattullus at 2:08 PM on July 8, 2021 [7 favorites]

College students are not particularly judgmental about dysfunctional relationships. It makes me wonder what else people were picking up on about Charles.

Thinking back to my college days, someone in their mid-30s might as well have been Grandpa Munster when compared to the typical late teens-early twenties cohort that made up a majority of the student body.
posted by dr_dank at 2:10 PM on July 8, 2021 [4 favorites]

What I remember of Cat Person was that it highlighted the unpleasantness of a situation with a power differential where nothing was explicitly (or illegally) "evil", but it certainly toed the line of consent in a way that was not good.

What's shocking about the information in the new piece is that nearly the exact same description applies. Roupenian had power of voice, and she projected her own feelings, inferences, (and perhaps relationship processing?) on to a completely different person who had no voice or control or even awareness that she (Nowicki) was involved until after the fact. If Roupenian wanted to center the age difference as a meaningful part of the story, she could have created a truly fictional character to do so. Sure "artists do this all the time" but it toes the line of consent in a way that is not good. It's as if someone started taking pictures of a person while they were walking along on the street and then used them in a piece of public art with a negative message - it seems reasonable the person in the photo might be upset.
posted by BlueBlueElectricBlue at 2:11 PM on July 8, 2021 [18 favorites]

I have some personal experience with seeing real people fictionalized thinly, both as a subject and as a witness.

A while back I met a visiting author, after a nine-hour day of being on my feet in public. I was exhausted, delirious, and in more than a little pain, and when we went out to eat I sat leaning forward across the table because it hurt slightly less, which I should have recognized as an invasion of their personal space and should have acknowledged and apologized for, with an offer to move (so: not off to a great start. This is ... not as uncommon as I'd like). I made a joke I thought was clever but which probably hit closer to "failure mode of clever" territory, and failed to save it with another and, at some point shortly after, the author mentioned that sometimes they didn't want certain people to like them, following that--while looking me straight in the eye--by saying that sometimes they incorporated people they disliked into their work, but in a way which they would never recognize. Things got worse from there and after a while my anxiety got the better of me so I paid my bill and got up to leave. When I was at the door one of my coworkers said to the author "He's just going to leave without saying anything?" and I froze for a second but then even more strongly felt the need to leave, ignored it, and went home. In the author's next book there was a brash, callous lesbian who was quite unlike any character the author had written before, and I thought "huh, so that's how they saw me." Maybe it's how I come across. I don't know. Personally, I feel much more like Murderbot crossed with Eeyore, with cameos from The Hulk.

On another occasion, a co-worker brought me a book by a local (but nationally-known) author, pointed at a paragraph, and said "read that." I got maybe a sentence in, stopped, and said "huh," then kept reading. The author listed a half-dozen identifiable traits of a former co-worker who had committed suicide, then went on to talk about the suicide. I felt this odd mix of anger, offense, disbelief, and disgust, as if someone had deliberately shit on my shoe. Two of my co-workers were at odds about it; one felt it was lazy and exploitative and the other felt like it was a tribute to the former co-worker. I was busy trying not to have emotions and couldn't think of much to say except that I wanted more fiction in my fiction.

At any rate, I feel like incorporating people into fiction in a way that they, their friends, or their loved ones can recognize is pretty much always hurtful, but I'm clearly not in any position to lecture anyone about that. People can write what they want; and at the end of the day, those authors have their flourishing careers, best-sellers, optioned properties, and (for at least one of them) millions of dollars, whereas all I've got is an unremarkable career and a constant desire to go back to bed.
posted by johnofjack at 2:58 PM on July 8, 2021 [9 favorites]

Roupenian had power of voice, and she projected her own feelings, inferences, (and perhaps relationship processing?) on to a completely different person who had no voice or control or even awareness that she (Nowicki) was involved until after the fact.

Had she written non-fiction about Nowicki, this might have been the case (or at least more of the case). But she was not writing about Nowicki. She was writing about a fictional character whose life shared a number of details with Nowicki's. I don't mean this as some kind of dodge--I think if you gave Roupenian truth serum and asked her before this controversy even blew up if she was writing about Nowicki, she would say, "Of course not. I'm writing about the protagonist of 'Cat Person.'"

I think it is entirely fair and reasonable to discuss whether, in the real world, the publication of the story may have had unintended consequences for Nowicki or Charles, and to what degree the writer might be responsible for them. But I'm taken aback by the number of people who seem to believe that any fictional character quite literally is a real person. Roupenian isn't telling Nowicki's story, she nowhere claims to be telling Nowicki's story, and she isn't even capable of telling real person Nowicki's story in fiction.
posted by praemunire at 3:00 PM on July 8, 2021 [9 favorites]

I get that it's weird and unsettling to see personal details of yourself in fiction, and yeah, it's always good ethical practice for a fiction writer to remove identifying details of the people they're using in their writing. So far, so good.

But jeez, if a fictional story that borrows some details from a subject's life is making the subject question their own reality? If a bad sexual encounter depicted in fiction is making the subject wonder whether their real life good sexual encounter never really occurred?? That's not the fiction writer's fault or responsibility. That's 100% the subject's own personal issue with personal sense of identity and grasp of their own reality.
posted by MiraK at 3:01 PM on July 8, 2021 [8 favorites]

I think a lot of the questions raised in the last few comments fall back to what might be described as artistic integrity. And that again is an issue I think we are going to grapple with a lot more in coming years.
If something is a magnificent work of art, critics and the public have been prone to downplaying whatever ethical issues there might be either within the work of art or concerning the author. Celine was a fascist and his writings promoted nihilism, but we still laud him as a genius. Personally, I find this troubling in literature, where the politics are spelled out, but I have to admit there are some fascist architects that interest me, such as Terragni, where the politics are more abstractly expressed.
In the same vein, but perhaps less different that we like to think, autofiction by Knausgård, or adaptions of real stories by Truman Capote are acknowledged as masterpieces, regardless of whatever suffering they may have caused. The other post today, about Anne Theroux' memoir, is highlighting how the "art" is valued over life.
If something more mundane or less eloquent is published, we are more ready to criticize the use of personal histories and memories, not to mention gossip. But why is that? Well, I know, art. But does great art really overrule life? And is it not valid for art students, in a society that prizes authenticity, to attempt to create authentic art?

On the other hand literary interpretation can change the understanding of what happened, regardless of the facts.

An example that didn't harm living people but probably had some political motive I can't guess about today is Stefan Zweig's novel about Mary, Queen of Scots. In the novel, she is the heroine, and her cousin Elizabeth is what we today would call a psychopath. All of Zweig's historical novels had a huge impact on the Continental public understanding of history during the early twentieth century. For me as a child, it was a huge surprise moving from England to the continent (Germany, Italy, Denmark) with Elizabeth I as my till then legitimate hero and role model.

A more serious example is how authors in ex-Jugoslavia created works that fueled the antagonisms and led to civil war.
posted by mumimor at 3:02 PM on July 8, 2021 [4 favorites]

praemunire - I can see your point. For me personally, I think the author has a heavier ethical responsibility than that. (I also think things are much more complicated with regards to Charles than Nowicki.) If I use a stranger's public photo as an avatar of a personality I create out of whole cloth on twitter, does that person get to feel unhappy that I clothed my fictional character in their face? Is it okay if I change a few details but leave the features recognizable enough so that the person's friends and family call them up and ask them if they have a twitter account?

To be admittedly disingenuous/provocative in my point of view - if she wasn't writing about Nowicki, then why did she write so much that was identifiably about Nowicki?
posted by BlueBlueElectricBlue at 3:18 PM on July 8, 2021 [5 favorites]

Seeing yourself in another's work is disarming, well unless it's shared before publication and that falls into. "hey bill, check out page 73, is that ok, because I can change it"
yeah. oddly, I believe the poetry differs to an extent then fiction as yregard to borrowing (stealing) material and it's called Poetic License. The best line could work but if the subject matter ruffles the person, it's not pleasant.
And that's when the responding counter poem comes, emnity, visceral layers, double entendre doubled back. Rondo as narrative back hoeing, ruining the whole thing, were it becomes more weapon then art. NTTTAME.

from the article:“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."
commenters above have noted this well, the confessional aspects have a tendency to turn didactic narrative, unbalancing the narrative quality of the text.

At Galmpton- Brixham, S. Devon. 1945 Robert Graves wrote:
"Since poems should be self-explanatory I refrain from more forward then this: that I write poems for poets, and satires or grotesques for wits. For people in general I write prose, and am content that they should be unaware that I do anything else. To write poems for other than poets is wasteful. The moral of the Scilly Islanders who earned a precarious livelihood by taking in one another's washing is that they never upset their carefully balanced island economy by trying to horn into the laundry trade of the mainland; and nowhere in the Western Hemisphere was washing so we'll done."
posted by clavdivs at 3:24 PM on July 8, 2021 [1 favorite]

It's as if someone started taking pictures of a person while they were walking along on the street and then used them in a piece of public art with a negative message - it seems reasonable the person in the photo might be upset

Is that a fair comparison though?? Stealing a few biographical details from someone's life to build a new fictional character is nothing like using someone's photographic likeness in your ad! Someone's actual picture identifies them in a way that listing the exact location of their first date in a story simply does not.

I once read about an artist mom who made an abstract sculpture depicting her teenage daughter's rape. The teen, quite understandably, became estranged from her mother after that. Even though it was a bunch of abstract rape-ish shapes with a random title, subject her mother had chosen was wholly specific to the daughter. It was a straight representation of the daughter's real rape, abstract though it might have been. There was absolutely nothing to separate the daughter's rape from the depicted rape in the sculpture, and what's more, these two were mother and daughter, not total strangers, so there was zero distance between art and reality. THAT is a violation.

Imagine instead that the mother had made a sculpture of Medusa being raped by Zeus: it would have been a slightly lesser violation. She's still using the real rape of someone she knows as intimately as her daughter to make her art, but at least she cloaks the inspiration in a different name and image. That is something.

If, instead, the mother had created a sculpture of her daughter's best friend's nanny's boyfriend getting arrested... a man whom she knows literally nothing about - not how he looks, not his name, not how old he is, not where he lives - except that he dated a particular nanny and got arrested at a certain location... that is not any kind of violation at all. The artwork is almost totally just pure imagination on the part of the artist. Even if the arrested guy correctly spots a few uncanny details in it that resemble him, there's too much distance between reality and art for the accusation of violation to be valid.
posted by MiraK at 3:32 PM on July 8, 2021

I have a relative who wrote a novel for an MFA program that was admittedly a fictionalized account of some family events. I don't know exactly what those specific events were (there are so many to choose from!) or if I played a role in them because I've never read the novel and my relative has always been tight-lipped about it (other than saying it's based on a family event and some of us are in it) and has never offered to share it with anyone. But they did shop it around after graduation, and for the sake of our relationship, I'm glad it didn't get picked up by any publishers.

In my profession, I've had to sit through countless hours of training on what personally identifiable data is, how to secure it, how to anonymize it, and the consequences for leaking it. Maybe MFA programs need to have the same training. It doesn't seem like it should have been that difficult to shuffle around the details to maintain plausible deniability.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 3:43 PM on July 8, 2021 [4 favorites]

Seeing yourself in another's work is disarming

I think it's salutary to remember that, to the extent other people think of us at all, they are telling themselves a story about us in their heads that most often we would find upsetting or mortifying in some way. Yes, even good friends and loved ones. There's a reason why the classic comeuppance for the eavesdropper is hearing themselves discussed in an unflattering way. I don't blame Nowicki at all for being disconcerted. I think most people would be.
posted by praemunire at 4:00 PM on July 8, 2021 [4 favorites]

Metafilter: an accounting of all the terrible white men who have done this and worse over the years
posted by mikeand1 at 4:09 PM on July 8, 2021 [2 favorites]

This whole thing is really strange to me on a few levels. But I think the thing that sticks out to me is that Nowicki is a very good writer, and in several places is able to create an impression of wrong/harm that are not really borne out by the details she provides. I think this is where a lot of the extremes of opinion are coming from - I've seen people on twitter and elsewhere saying things like "Charles committed suicide because of this" or "Roupenian said this was based on a true story." The first is something one could maybe glean from subtext but is definitely not a known fact. The second is demonstrably untrue, as Roupenian pretty much said the opposite in interviews. And then of course other people, especially writers, are going to want to push back on this.

One of the things that irks me about this thing is how people keep wanting to make it into a conversation about What Is the Nature of Art? or Is There Even Really Such a Thing As Fiction?

I think Nowicki kind of invited that with the digression into autofiction. A digression that I found especially odd, since Cat Person is definitely NOT autofiction! The fact that it FELT real to so many people does not make it autobiographical, it makes it effective storytelling. This is part of what I mean by implying and invoking things that are not supported by the details she offers. By invoking autofiction and talking about authors who blur the line between truth and fiction, she helps us come away with the idea that Roupenian fictionalized Nowicki's life.

I do really feel for Nowicki. That must have felt really disorienting, frustrating, and even violating. And of course she has the right to tell her story! Especially as a writer herself. So it really is very complicated.
posted by lunasol at 4:13 PM on July 8, 2021 [5 favorites]

Oof. Nobody involved in this story is going to feel good.

Our culture is becoming more aware of both identity issues and data privacy issues in ways we never have faced before. What’s happened here is an example of how that can look in practice. These situations subtly and collectively raise our consciousness about what’s right, what’s fair, and what’s yours — in both the ownership sense and membership sense. It increasingly matters. What’s my story to tell? Who owns my identity? My likeness? My details? When is it a privacy issue? Where are the lines between decency, respect, ethical responsibility, common sense, best practice?

All of these meanings are shifting a bit right now. In ten years it may be unthinkable to write a piece based on someone’s identity data. It will be because of an accumulation of lived examples like this one, slowly shifting the Overton window of what’s acceptable use.

It just absolutely sucks for everyone involved in it right now. It will get better. I hope they’re all safe and that the impact of this is ultimately peaceful and good.
posted by iamkimiam at 4:25 PM on July 8, 2021 [6 favorites]

[slight derail but I wanted to say that Cat Person ended up in a collection of Roupenian's stories called "You Know You Want This" and I was enthralled by them. Reading that book felt electric.]
posted by macrael at 4:37 PM on July 8, 2021

> "An example that didn't harm living people but probably had some political motive I can't guess about today is Stefan Zweig's novel about Mary, Queen of Scots"

(I haven't read Zweig's novel, but Continental European portrayals of Mary as the hero and Elizabeth of the villain is something that goes back literally hundreds of years. It originally stemmed from Catholic vs. Protestant politics, but enough influential works were written that way that over time it has simply become A Thing. It's sort of like if the split in perception that resulted in Shakespeare's villainous Joan of Arc vs. Christine de Pisan's depiction of her as a hero had to a large extent persisted to the present day, instead of at some point resolving into a generally positive view of her in both England and France.)
posted by kyrademon at 5:20 PM on July 8, 2021 [5 favorites]

Some of the reactions to this piece from Twitter and here have significantly decreased my respect for literary fiction and the culture that seems to surround it. I accept that Roupenian acted without malice in writing the story, but she committed a serious ethical breach in using so many identifying details of a real relationship and person she proceeded to slander in fiction.

It is clear from her response to Nowicki:

[...] I can absolutely see why the inclusion of those details in the story would cause you significant pain and confusion, and I can’t tell you how sorry I am about that. [...]

That she understands harm has been done and has made an attempt to apologise. The way she hurt Nowicki is more important than the piece's literary merit or discussing whether Charles is actually a predator or how theft is the basis of all fiction writing.

The impression I get from how some authors are reacting to what Roupenian did is that MFA programs are toxic swamps where writing badly disguised call out pieces is normalised at least in works submitted for credit and not publication.

Follow dril's advice and invent someone to get mad at instead.
posted by zymil at 5:28 PM on July 8, 2021 [10 favorites]

But jeez, if a fictional story that borrows some details from a subject's life is making the subject question their own reality? If a bad sexual encounter depicted in fiction is making the subject wonder whether their real life good sexual encounter never really occurred?? That's not the fiction writer's fault or responsibility. That's 100% the subject's own personal issue with personal sense of identity and grasp of their own reality.

If you can't see how dozens of people who know you personally thinking Cat Person was an accurate reflection of one of your past relationships could feel like gaslighting or slowly make you doubt yourself I don't even know what to say.

I hope you aren't an author.
posted by zymil at 5:46 PM on July 8, 2021 [20 favorites]

But then you do seem to be objecting to use real details of real people in fiction without their permission? I'm not quite sure I understand the reasoning behind this distinction.

We just had a post about Shannon Lee calling out Quentin Tarantino for incorporating her very real father into his very fictional story and depicting him as a racist caricature for cheap laughs.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 6:05 PM on July 8, 2021 [11 favorites]

We just had a post about Shannon Lee calling out Quentin Tarantino for incorporating her very real father into his very fictional story and depicting him as a racist caricature for cheap laughs.

That was regular old-school critique of a specific work for being racist/disrespectful/inaccurate, not wholesale questioning the acceptability of using real people and their life details in all fiction and non-fiction. There's a huge difference between the two! I'm asking about the latter.

Roupenian isn't being accused of depicting a real person in a racist or inaccurate way. She's being accused of violating someone's privacy by basing a fictional character on real life details, and in this thread people are saying it IS a violation to ever use real life details of people in fiction. Why, though? If it's ok to do it flagrantly and blatantly in nonfiction, shouldn't it be ok in fiction?
posted by MiraK at 6:11 PM on July 8, 2021 [1 favorite]

Is anyone here saying it's an invasion of privacy to write negatively about real people using identifying details and without their permission in a *nonfiction* book, such as a memoir or biography or an expose? I don't think you are... But then you do seem to be objecting to use real details of real people in fiction without their permission? I'm not quite sure I understand the reasoning behind this distinction.

The difference though is that a nonfiction essay/book would be fact-checked (though obviously memoirs often enter into a he-said she-said territory with the more famous author often having the upper-hand). And with non-fiction, the author is hinging their credibility on the truth-claims they make in their writing. That's not the case in fiction. The New Yorker won't publish essays that don't make it past their fact-checkers, and in instances where false information does still make it through, it ends up as news and typically gets retracted or amended.

I don't think most people would object to an author pulling some details from a real person they knew to build a character as long as the final product is different enough from the real person to not be recognizable. Or to just base a character entirely on a real person and include barely any fictional elements. That clearly didn't happen here though. And for me, the problem is that most people are not that good at realizing that a fictional character can both be partially linked to a real person and also partially completely made up. Clearly, a number of people read "Cat Person" as being a true depiction of the relationship between two real people, in a way that was extremely unflattering (to put it mildly) when that wasn't the case. That's the problem.
posted by coffeecat at 6:18 PM on July 8, 2021 [4 favorites]

Clearly, a number of people read "Cat Person" as being a true depiction of the relationship between two real people, in a way that was extremely unflattering (to put it mildly) when that wasn't the case. That's the problem.

I'm not sure if this is common practice in western countries but almost all Bollywood movies open with a card with the standard disclaimer of "any resemblance to any person living or dead is purely coincidental". Sounds like writers here need to start using something like that on the regular at the top of their stories!
posted by MiraK at 6:23 PM on July 8, 2021

hearing themselves discussed in an unflattering way
or flattering. At best it's well meant muse. At worst, we have to take thier class for the fast track into the poetry set..I, digress.

also has a small-town vibe
Yes, Ann Arbor is a place were you knew Shakey Jake but didn't write him into a story.

'The Thieves.'

"Lovers in the act despense
With such meum-tuum sense
As might warningly reveal
What they must not pick or steal,
And their nostrum is to say:
'I and you are both away.'

After, when they disentwine
You from me and yours from mine,
Neither can be certain who
Was that I whose mine was you.
To the act again they go
More completely not to know.

Theft is theft and raid is raid
Though reciprocally made.
Lovers, the conclusion is
Doubled sighs and jealousies
In a single heart that grieves
For lost honour among thieves."
-Robert Graves.
posted by clavdivs at 6:28 PM on July 8, 2021 [10 favorites]

I'm just so tired of these middle class MFA writers endlessly mining each other's lives for material. Hopefully the pandemic will have encouraged a wave of research from these writers, and instead of college-aged people having unsuccessful relationships and being depressed we'll get ironclad designers having unsuccessful relationships and being depressed, or superintelligent shades of the colour blue having unsuccessful relationships and being depressed, or hot-dog eating champions having unsuccessful relationships and being depressed. Anything, dear god, anything, but another story about an MFA writer's extended social circle.

It's a big jump from "only read by other MFAers" to "read in the New Yorker" (and another still for the viral nature of this piece, but no one could have foreseen that).

I think it's worth noting, in light of these percipient remarks as well as others in this thread, that the CIA subsidized, influenced. and monitored MFA programs and writer's workshops in this country for more than two generations, and that the work we see out of these programs today continues to flow from watersheds delineated and planted by the CIA:

How the CIA Helped Shape the Creative Writing Scene in America

According to Eric Bennett, writing at The Chronicle of Higher Education and in his book Workshops of Empire, the Agency instrumentalized not only the literary publishing world, but also the institution that became its primary training ground, the writing program at the University of Iowa.

The Iowa Writer’s Workshop “emerged in the 1930s and powerfully influenced the creative-writing programs that followed,” Bennett explains. “More than half of the second-wave programs, about 50 of which appeared by 1970, were founded by Iowa graduates.” The program “attained national eminence by capitalizing on the fears and hopes of the Cold War”—at first through its director, self-appointed cold warrior Paul Engle, with funding from CIA front groups, the Rockefeller Foundation, and major corporations. (Kurt Vonnegut, an Iowa alum, described Engle as “a hayseed clown, a foxy grandpa, a terrific promoter, who, if you listened closely, talks like a man with a paper asshole.”)

Under Engle writers like Raymond Carver, Flannery O’Connor, Robert Lowell, and John Berryman went through the program. In the literary world, its dominance is at times lamented for the imposition of a narrow range of styles on American writing. And many a writer has felt shut out of the publishing world and its coteries of MFA program alums. When it comes to certain kinds of writing at least, some of them may be right—the system has been informally rigged in ways that date back to a time when the CIA and conservative funders approved and sponsored the high modernist fiction beloved by the New Critics, witty realism akin to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s (and later John Cheever), and magical realism (part of the agency’s attempt to control Latin American literary culture.)
...
The direct influence of the CIA on the country’s preeminent literary institutions may have waned, or faded entirely, who can say—and in any case, the institutions Whitney and Bennett write about have less cultural valence than they once did. But even so, we can see the effect on American creative writing, which continues to occupy a fairly narrow range and show some hostility to work deemed too abstract, argumentative, experimental, or “postmodern.” One result may be that writers who want to get funded and published have to conform to rules designed to co-opt and corral literary writing.

But the CIA didn't just want writing which promoted values of individualism and conservatism while excoriating communism, socialism, social consciousness and 'philosophy', it wanted the actual dirt on real people, which it could use against them in venues such as the HUAC hearing of the 50s, and also to control appointments to influential positions in the academy, publishing, and the big non-profits.

I bet if we could read transcripts of lectures in those workshops and programs, we would find all kinds of in retrospect not terribly subtle exhortations to use the 'authentic' details of the lives of the people you knew best and not to be overly concerned if they were compromising, because that could only make the writing truer to life.
posted by jamjam at 6:37 PM on July 8, 2021 [32 favorites]

On non-fiction: Well, imagine that I google-stalked and otherwise researched my ex's ex, someone I'd never met and not a public figure, and wrote a non-fiction piece in which they were completely identifiable for the New Yorker because I felt that randomly focusing on the private life of this stranger without their permission would tell us something about society. A lot of people would consider that pretty creepy and intrusive!

My point is that we assume that truly undisguised non-fiction has some purpose beyond "here are some facts about this random totally identifiable individual who is alive and can be tracked down".
posted by Frowner at 6:58 PM on July 8, 2021 [14 favorites]

That was regular old-school critique of a specific work for being racist/disrespectful/inaccurate, not wholesale questioning the acceptability of using real people and their life details in all fiction and non-fiction. There's a huge difference between the two! I'm asking about the latter.

I don't think there's as much of a difference as you think there is. Tarantino still used real details about a real person to create a fictional version of Bruce Lee who fit into his fictional story. The article itself might have focused on particular objections to the depiction instead of generalities regarding the practice, but it's still an example of an author's wholesale appropriation of someone's personal details for their own benefit.

I'm not sure if this is common practice in western countries but almost all Bollywood movies open with a card with the standard disclaimer of "any resemblance to any person living or dead is purely coincidental". Sounds like writers here need to start using something like that on the regular at the top of their stories!

But then if you actually did base a supposedly fictional character on a real person living or dead, then the similarities wouldn't be a coincidence and that disclaimer would be a lie.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 6:58 PM on July 8, 2021 [10 favorites]

I'm not sure if this is common practice in western countries but almost all Bollywood movies open with a card with the standard disclaimer of "any resemblance to any person living or dead is purely coincidental".

Hollywood does this too, as do some novels. But as has already been argued, this kinda only works if it is purely coincidental. Or at least, if there are enough details that appear to describe a real person to the point that that real person ends up getting several texts from friends asking if they wrote the story under a pen name...that would seem to be too much resemblance.

All that said, my take is that this was carelessness and not malice on the part of Roupenian. And it's an interesting case of how 'going viral' can be unsettling even when the response is mostly positive.
posted by coffeecat at 7:29 PM on July 8, 2021 [2 favorites]

But then if you actually did base a supposedly fictional character on a real person living or dead, then the similarities wouldn't be a coincidence and that disclaimer would be a lie.

What was it Carl Sagan said? That to make an apple pie from scratch you first have to invent the universe? Every character in all literature ever has been based on real people to some extent, so this statement is technically *always* a lie. The question is, what exact percentage of real life-ness is allowed in a character before you can consider the disclaimer to be true in good faith?

IMO it's definitely above more than the level of real life-ness in Roupenian's character. Taking a handful of real life details about a person as told by a second hand source and then inventing everything else about them, giving them an invented name, an invented appearance, invented thoughts, invented personality, invented feelings, invented experiences, etc. is a pretty darn low level of real life-ness.

Like seriously this Slate essay goes out of its way to note how very different that character was from the real life person... And yet skillfully uses the differences as an accusation against Roupenian!

It's so sneaky how the observation that Roupenian's character has a totally different personality than the real life person - i.e. evidence in Roupenian's favor against the charge of invasiveness - gets morphed into "oh no! am I really like *that*? see how that cruel non-fiction profile of me makes me question my own perceptions of my real self! Roupenian is truly diabolical to mess with me so!"

It's so sneaky how the observation that nothing like the incidents in the story actually happened to this person - i.e. more evidence in Roupenian's favor - morphs into "alas, I am forced to question the veracity of my own memories because this non-fiction profile of me just surely be the accurate version of what really happened to me! see how Roupenian is making me feel crazy?"

But no. Don't be bamboozled by the mirrors and reversals of reality, that's just a trick. This article admits to vast differences between reality and Roupenian's character. The percentage of real life-ness in that character is quite low enough to make the disclaimer true.

My point is that we assume that truly undisguised non-fiction has some purpose beyond "here are some facts about this random totally identifiable individual who is alive and can be tracked down".

Of course. I wasn't talking about meaningless doxxing! But I can think of entire genres of non-fiction which are constituted entirely of negative portrayals of real life people: memoirs about abusive parents or partners, first person accounts of being kidnapped or growing up in cults, any kind of biography or memoir.. There is nobody here who considers that an invasion of privacy, right? If the objection to Roupenian is that her writing violated someone's privacy due to it resembling them, then I'm just unsure to understand how memoirs or biographies or other non-fiction are exempt from that concern. (Fact checking is no guard against violation of privacy.)
posted by MiraK at 7:37 PM on July 8, 2021 [4 favorites]

But Mira, memoirs and autobiographies involve your own stories which of course you have a right to tell. This is a made-up encounter but grounds itself in reality through the identity of a real person who the author does not know. Roupenian says in her apology email that she used clues from social media, which means it wasn't just surface-level stuff or second-hand knowledge, she went looking for details about this person she didn't know. That's wholly different from knowing details of someone because their story interacts with your own and gets told through the telling of your own story through memoir.

I think you're misreading the level of harm that Nowicki is alleging here and responding in Roupenian's defense like this is some attempted cancellation. I read Nowicki's essay as telling her own story and adding in the context of being used as fodder for someone else's viral story. That is a notable thing to happen in one's life and worth writing about.
posted by shesdeadimalive at 8:27 PM on July 8, 2021 [27 favorites]

Do MFAs talk about the real-world consequences of writing from life? Maybe they should.

I'm sure other people have answered this by now, but in my MFA program (Goddard College, 93) we talked about this all the time. So many of us were writing from life, at least using real people and events as jumping-off points, that we had the ethics, and possible consequences, of it very much in mind. For most of us, it was that we were writing about our families—many of us were queer, and hadn't been treated well by family, and were working that out at the same time that we were strongly advocating for the value of the stories we had to tell.
posted by Orlop at 9:15 PM on July 8, 2021 [3 favorites]

Could you first do an accounting of all the terrible white men who have done this and worse over the years and then maybe we can get to pretending to understand the law of defamation? Thanks.

The thread above this one is about a woman who, in her 70s, has written a memoir about her divorce, decades ago, from a famous writer, because she was tired of being a character in other people's stories and wanted to tell her own.
posted by Orlop at 9:17 PM on July 8, 2021 [11 favorites]

Yes, Ann Arbor is a place were you knew Shakey Jake but didn't write him into a story.

I'd think you'd write a thinly-disguised Shakey-Jake-like character to show that you really knew the town.

For the non-Ann-Arborites among us, here is the Wikipedia article on Shakey Jake.
posted by Orlop at 9:36 PM on July 8, 2021 [5 favorites]

What are everyone's favorite works of fiction whose energy and genius derive in part from how they use real life people and events in a way that is somewhere between careless and cruel?

I mean, is Dante too old school for this conversation, because sending your real life enemies to hell and describing their torments there is just *chef's kiss*
posted by thivaia at 9:46 PM on July 8, 2021 [4 favorites]

Discussing this publicly at all feels obscurely like a trap. At some level it's hard not to think that the worst possible outcome right now for everyone involved is to subject them to a further round of searchable, lasting, reductive, online commentary.

That said, I feel like people are talking past each other to some extent over what kinds of details are the issue here. Loosely speaking, it seems like you could break them into three groups.

(1) Biographical details: Character is from Such And Such Town and attended Such And Such College and held a job at Such And Such Place.

(2) Life stories, external: Character, when just out of high school, dated a much older man who has Such And Such Visible Personality Traits.

(3) Life stories, internal: Character's private relationship with that man was problematic and upsetting, and ended in a terrible way.

In this case, Cat Person Author seems to have mined Essay Author's life for some of group 1 and 2, while contributing her own take on 3.

I don't think many people believe details along the lines of group 2 should be entirely off limits to writers. The issue here, to the extent it exists, is combining that with a cohesive enough set of group 1 details based on one person that the person in question is readily identifiable, and then tying those identifying details to the inner life imagined in group 3.

It seems particularly unnecessary because it's mostly the group 2 and 3 details that made the story resonate with a lot of people, and it's hard to imagine that impact would have been lessened or that the story would have been compromised by giving the character a different set of background biographical details.

As others have said, though, this is people publicly working through a complicated conversation about fiction. We don't have to decide who's wrong or try to mete out some set of consequences.
posted by eponym at 9:48 PM on July 8, 2021 [18 favorites]

I have some sympathy for Nowicki's response - there are incidents in my life and stories about them which feel "mine" or belonging to someone in my family and I have had other people use those narrative arcs and create a story and I was furious at the appropriation.

When I examined the source of my fury, partly it came from the writer's obliviousness to the context of the story, partly because they did not know the people involved and so rendered them into a literary device instead of the full person that I knew.

Or maybe they were just bad writers
posted by Barbara Spitzer at 10:03 PM on July 8, 2021 [3 favorites]

Roupenian says in her apology email that she used clues from social media, which means it wasn't just surface-level stuff or second-hand knowledge, she went looking for details about this person she didn't know. That's wholly different from knowing details of someone because their story interacts with your own and gets told through the telling of your own story through memoir.

But that's potentially blurry as well. Roupenian wrote the story *after* finding Nowicki on social media. Was she mining for story inspiration, or was she just clicking around the internet when her curiosity about Charles led to browsing through the social media accounts of his contacts? I think it's the latter. It's such an easy thing to do -- a few clicks, a memory jogged, a name remembered, and suddenly you have years of a complete stranger's history, labeled and photographed and instagrammed, right there in the pale blue glow of your phone. I've done it myself.

And then suddenly although you're strangers, there's now a kind of context and connection there. This stranger is now part of your story but you're not a part of theirs, so there's this asymmetry that feels strange and unnerving. Roupenian was absolutely in the wrong to include such particular details, and she acknowledges this. But I'm sympathetic to how Roupenian at the time of writing it as a class assignmenment, while reacting to these details, may have been unable to resist.

There's an irony to this whole situation in that when I read the story -- when my friends read the story -- most of us saw ourselves in it in some way. I had that creepy feeling like I was being watched. I'm fascinated by Nowicki's more literal experience here, and her candor in presenting her experience.
posted by mochapickle at 10:05 PM on July 8, 2021 [7 favorites]

- Also also, it is obvious that Charles told Kristin all about Alexis, so shouldn't Alexis be mad at...Charles? - posted by all about eevee
-- People get to talk to their friends and lovers about previous relationships. You can always tell your story. But if that friend of your old lover then takes that story, publishes it with all the identifying details intact, except she makes it darker and worse, that’s a violation. - posted by Pater Aletheias

After several people contacted Nowicki about "Cat Person," she communicated with Charles himself about it, and this is how that went:
He texted me as he was reading:
“this is weird!”
“it is very disparaging to the guy, am I a slimeball”
I’d assured him that with me, he wasn’t. Eventually, he changed the subject.

It was December 2017, they'd been broken up for more than two years, but Nowicki didn't press him: At that point, I was trying to avoid probing personal topics with him in order to distance myself. I was hoping not to encourage him to rely on me. Years go by, Charles dies, and Nowicki finally learns more from David:
About an hour into a conversation full of attempts to articulate just how special Charles was, he brought up “Cat Person.” “He was always so upset that she brought you into it,” he said. I paused, taking in what this might mean. I’d spent the past three years trying to convince myself that it was just some crazy coincidence.

“Did Charles know her?” I asked. Yes, David told me. He did.

Yes, Roupenian needed to change more details in her story. And yes, I think Nowicki can be mad at Charles. When "Cat Person" was published, instead of providing info and context, he wanted, and received, soothing. Even after the story entered the zeitgeist, Charles never looped Nowicki in.
posted by Iris Gambol at 11:33 PM on July 8, 2021 [7 favorites]

I wonder how Nowicki will feel about this in ten years, or twenty years. After this discussion got me re-examining my own similar story, I read her story again, and there is something about her friends' reactions that feels very uncomfortable. Why wouldn't they share apartments with her because of Charles? To me that seems very dramatic, but there may be some American subtext I am not understanding as a European. When I was young I had some friends who had older boyfriends, and I can't imagine that would lead me to not wanting to share a house with them. I had an older boyfriend but my peers certainly didn't shun me and I didn't hide from them.
Actually, one of my friends from college is coming here to stay for a while and I really look forward to re-examining our memories from that time with this exchange between Nowicki and Roupenian as a new context.
posted by mumimor at 1:26 AM on July 9, 2021 [2 favorites]

I read Nowicki's essay as telling her own story and adding in the context

Oh I definitely agree with that, even if I think there's a lot of calculated posturing in the Slate article. It's just her side and her comment. What does unsettle me is people deciding that it's a violation for writers of fiction (or rather only this particular female fiction writer who successfully skewered at a certain type of creepy guy in her fiction) to base fictional characters on real life people at all. It's not a violation if you made up 90% of the character and never even knew the real person, imo.
posted by MiraK at 4:03 AM on July 9, 2021

The character of Charles, as written by Roupenian, is objectively a creep and a predator. If we cannot unequivocally condemn that, do we even stand for anything?
posted by acb at 4:34 AM on July 9, 2021

I'll just throw in that Ann Arbor, while technically a small city, also has a small-town vibe to it. It's the sort of place where it's hard to go out without running into someone you know. Which is to say, I have no doubt that a lot of people recognized who these people were, not just their friends.

I've lived in Ann Arbor for forty years (I've been told to smile by Shakey Jake), and I'm going to push back on this a bit. First, when I read Cat Person the first time, I didn't even realize it was set in Ann Arbor. I just reread it, and the only Ann Arbor–specific reference is the Quality 16. The setting of the story really just reads generic college town to me. It does mention Saline, but that could put it in Lawrence, Kansas, where I've also lived, which also has an art house theater and is not far from a small town called Saline.

I know people who work at the University, and I've taken workshops with profs in the MFA program, but I just don't know anyone in that program and would not have recognized these people. Even when I was in graduate school here, I didn't really know students outside of my program. I was even in the English department working on a PhD, and I didn't know the MFA students. After rereading the story, the physical description of Charles seems the most likely giveaway to those who knew them. I'm still a little shocked that the story gave Nowicki's friends enough information to recognize her, though apparently it did. But no, I don't think it's true that more than a very few people in Ann Arbor would have known that the story is based on her relationship.
posted by FencingGal at 4:47 AM on July 9, 2021 [5 favorites]

Mild derail: if you’re the type who enjoys ruminating on issues like the ones raised in this saga, you may enjoy them being taken to tenability-testing extremes in the recent thriller The Plot (Fresh Air review, audio and transcript). Fun little page-turner built on questions of authorship and ownership of other people’s stories.
posted by barrett caulk at 4:53 AM on July 9, 2021 [2 favorites]

The character of Charles, as written by Roupenian, is objectively a creep and a predator.

The creep in "Cat Person" is never named. And this is a troublesome aspect: regardless of how often or strongly an author reaffirms that an inspired-by-reality story is fiction, in people's minds the inspiration and the fiction start to blend together, and the fiction can crowd out the reality.
posted by Pyry at 5:23 AM on July 9, 2021 [6 favorites]

What are everyone's favorite works of fiction whose energy and genius derive in part from how they use real life people and events in a way that is somewhere between careless and cruel?

This seems to assume that you think it is a good thing to do something somewhere between careless and cruel. You ask about people's favorite resulting fiction. What about cruel, crappy fiction?

I did not find "Cat Person" crappy btw, and I did not suspect it of that kind of cruelty. John Updike, Philip Roth and others invite this kind of speculation just by their style, before you even get into rumors around their characters and real life. Joyce Carol Oates, ditto. (Although Oates seems to take her characters through more of a fictionalizing process but that may just be her method, not an ethical decision.) One of my very favorite novelists has taken criticism over her treatment of a famous academic, in an academic novel. It sounds like that person was upset, or people who know them were upset, so I don't know. I'm not about to say every instance of this is ok because Hemingway did it. Times change, and Hemingway did a lot of stuff I don't think was ok.

I do think Nowicki's experience is interesting, if not yet fully digested. It is one thing to find yourself thinly disguised in the fiction of someone you know. It is another thing to find your relationship with your ex, in the work of someone you have never met, and then to have your ex suddenly die. I am kind of puzzled by the number of writers on twitter who have dismissed this piece as just trifling, more or less.
posted by BibiRose at 5:30 AM on July 9, 2021 [3 favorites]

Summer Brennan has now published an essay which I find a lot more reasonable than her tweets.
posted by BibiRose at 5:51 AM on July 9, 2021 [4 favorites]

Why wouldn't they share apartments with her because of Charles? To me that seems very dramatic, but there may be some American subtext I am not understanding as a European. When I was young I had some friends who had older boyfriends, and I can't imagine that would lead me to not wanting to share a house with them. I had an older boyfriend but my peers certainly didn't shun me and I didn't hide from them.

In my experience at a US college, just having the older boyfriend wouldn't cause shunning, but if the older boyfriend was a serious creep (intentionally or unintentionally), then it would -- there are people you don't want coming into your living or social spaces, even if your friend loves them.
posted by Dip Flash at 6:05 AM on July 9, 2021 [12 favorites]

It seems to me that Roupenian never intended to punch down on anyone, but two people wound up on the receiving end after the piece was read so widely.

Arguments around whether R had a right to use those likenesses seem like a diversion from the story of the negative impact those decisions had on the people the likenesses were lifted from.
posted by FallibleHuman at 6:26 AM on July 9, 2021 [4 favorites]

Roupenian said she should have removed the name of the town, but in the linked story, there is no mention of Ann Arbor. Is it possible that the name Ann Arbor appeared in the original story and has now been removed?
posted by FencingGal at 6:54 AM on July 9, 2021 [1 favorite]

Maybe it's a generational thing, but I'm uncomfortable with the way Nowicki uses the word 'ghost' in this article.

'Ghosting' is when someone ends all communication with another person without any apparent justification.

When there is a clear and obvious reason for choosing to refuse to have anything to do with that person ever again, that is not ghosting.
posted by Cardinal Fang at 7:10 AM on July 9, 2021 [1 favorite]

I grew up in a small community two towns over from Saline, went to high school in Ann Arbor, and still regularly visit friends and family there. I've also met Shakey Jake multiple times (usually outside the Ann Arbor Public Library). The setting was very clear as Ann Arbor to me. Saline is ~20 minutes away from Ann Arbor.

Salina, KS in Saline county is ~2 hours away, so saying Salina, KS is not far from Lawrence is like saying Ann Arbor is not far from Grand Rapids.
posted by OntologicalPuppy at 7:15 AM on July 9, 2021 [2 favorites]

Salina, KS in Saline county is ~2 hours away, so saying Salina, KS is not far from Lawrence is like saying Ann Arbor is not far from Grand Rapids.

You are correct - it's been too long and I should have looked it up - but there's no mention in the story of how far away Saline is. She goes home for two weeks and doesn't see him - Saline could really be any distance away.

If you know it's Ann Arbor, then Ann Arbor fits - I just don't think it's clearly Ann Arbor from the description in the story. There's no real description of the Ann Arbor locations - I don't even know if the art house theater is the Michigan or the little place that was at Briarwood for a few years.
posted by FencingGal at 7:26 AM on July 9, 2021 [2 favorites]

@AnaMardoll - Fair warning, but I plan to delete most of my tweets this weekend and then seriously reconsider how I use this account, based on the widespread Cat Person conversation and authors admitting they sift through social media looking for content to use.
I don't really love having to do this, but I'd love even less opening a novel and finding myself and Kissmate in there.

Because several people have asked what this is about (or weren't online yesterday), the short version is:
Author wrote about boyfriend's ex in such personal detail that everyone in their lives knew it was about the Ex. Story got a massive movie deal.
Ex has come forward rather than be "discovered" by a reporter. Author apologized; other authors are defending writing Real Person Fic.
Now several white cis women authors are insisting that fiction is inherently done by trawling through friends' lives and/or social media for "characters" to lift into a book.
Marginalized people are worried about their stories being stolen, told incorrectly, or enriching others.
"Enriching" here meaning "granting unearned wealth to the people who stole our stories".

I wouldn't be surprised if we see more of this. And, not that I or anyone is entitled to someone's social media presence, but it feels like a distinct loss when people feel pressured to stop doing something they previously enjoyed for fear of that presence being harvested.
On the other hand, I've largely moved to private social media spheres myself (Slack, Discord, occasionally eyeing that neat Darius Kazemi writeup) and what public face I *do* have is calculated & circumscribed, so I'm not sure I have much room to speak.
posted by CrystalDave at 9:28 AM on July 9, 2021 [16 favorites]

Even without social media, I've definitely censored myself around ambitious writers who I thought wouldn't be above using my life in their own work. I've even decided against saying some things on MetaFilter because I thought someone could turn my experience into a story.

I remember one of my writing professors in college saying he would have no qualms about using an idea from a student and turning it into a story, which really put a damper on my writing for his class. His defense was that he would completely change the idea anyway and just get the germ of the story from the student.

I might be overly cautious, but I didn't need Cat Person or social media to feel like this was an issue. In fact, there was a story in an Oscar Wilde biography where one of the young men he hung out with told Wilde that he had written up one of Wilde's stories and published it - Wilde's response was that he must not use a story he'd told about a painting (obviously what became The Picture of Dorian Gray).
posted by FencingGal at 10:53 AM on July 9, 2021 [6 favorites]

Perhaps MFA writing courses should have a module in what is personally identifiable information and how to properly file the serial numbers off what you lift for inspiration?
posted by acb at 11:29 AM on July 9, 2021 [1 favorite]

Nowicki's article seems to me, more than anything else, a study in grief. I was struck by the fact that Charles' death was a buried lede, not revealed until more than halfway through the article. The emphasis on auto-fiction and ethics and Roupenian's responsibility and Nowicki's feelings all seemed like a bit of a smokescreen, perhaps a reflection of the fact that neither Nowicki nor Roupenian are yet able to process or comment on some of the deeper and bittersweet questions about death and memorializing a flawed person that could have been raised (and were touched on lightly, particularly in the final paragraph). Like: how much of the impetus for writing the article was based on Nowicki's attempt to process her own feelings about his death? How much was it an attempt to memorialize him more fully, to "set the record straight" in response to the supposed depiction of him in "Cat Person?" How do the questions about his morality and character get complicated by the fact that he died? Is there an impulse to be more forgiving towards him? What was it like for Roupenian to learn that a real person, on whom she had partially based a fictional character, died? (I would love to know more about the conversation between Nowicki and Roupenian when Nowicki shared the news, though I also fully understand and respect the desire for privacy). How does the fact of his death change the ethical landscape of writing about him?

The article was most compelling to me when Nowicki comments on her feelings about how Charles was depicted, and ultimately memorialized, in "Cat Person," and how she is struggling to sift through and trust her own memories of him. Those observations resonated for me so much when thinking about loss and grief.
posted by sleepingwithcats at 11:30 AM on July 9, 2021 [19 favorites]

Yeah. I don't think Nowicki would have written the article if Charles was alive.
posted by all about eevee at 11:54 AM on July 9, 2021 [3 favorites]

The creep in "Cat Person" is never named. And this is a troublesome aspect: regardless of how often or strongly an author reaffirms that an inspired-by-reality story is fiction, in people's minds the inspiration and the fiction start to blend together, and the fiction can crowd out the reality.

His name is Robert in the story. He is referred to by name several times. But interesting how this essay ends up making it difficult to remember that, huh?
posted by nayantara at 12:47 PM on July 9, 2021 [8 favorites]

That's not meant as a gotcha, btw. I had trouble remembering the character's name too. I had to go back to the original story in the New Yorker to find it.
posted by nayantara at 12:48 PM on July 9, 2021

The US published novels since the 1970s that I've read state on the copyright page something to the effect of: characters, incidents and dialogue are products of the author's imagination or used fictitiously.

So this basic disclaimer has been used in film since the 1930s after a person depicted in MGM's move about Rasputin sued. It continues to exist in movies and novels to try to prevent lawsuits, not because there is any truth in it. For instance, the article I linked to cites the film Raging Bull, which uses the disclaimer even though it is based on a memoir by a real person who was a consultant on the movie. This disclaimer does not in any way indicate that people in a work of "fiction" aren't based on real people. It may legally let authors off the hook (though it doesn't always), but there are bad ethical choices that don't violate the law.

Legally, Roupenian did nothing wrong. The ethics of this seem to be a different matter. Going through someone's social media accounts to use their experience in your story is creepy as fuck. Using details that are so connected to reality that your actual friends think you wrote the story under a pseudonym make this wrong, in my opinion. But the essence of the story doesn't really depend on Nowicki, as the essay by Summer Brennan linked above shows. Roupenian could have changed the problematic details without reducing the value or impact of her work of fiction at all. The important parts do come from her imagination.
posted by FencingGal at 3:00 PM on July 9, 2021 [10 favorites]

One of my very favorite novelists has taken criticism over her treatment of a famous academic, in an academic novel.

Is this I Love Dick by Chris Kraus? I loved that book when I read it 20 years ago and she's a great author, but reactions to the article above make me think that people would look at that book quite differently if it was released now.

"Dick was swiftly outed as the cultural theorist Dick Hebdige—much to his dismay, as Elaine Blair recounted in her recent Profile of Kraus."
posted by bootlegpop at 4:35 PM on July 9, 2021 [2 favorites]

The US published novels since the 1970s that I've read state on the copyright page something to the effect of: characters, incidents and dialogue are products of the author's imagination or used fictitiously.

That's fine but that's not a get out of jail free card. You can't write something clearly libelous and point to it claim that you have no responsibility for it. Well, you can, but the courts may be unimpressed. This particular instance isn't that but it taking two people that can be clearly identified by their friends and turning one into the victim of coercive (if not worse) sex and the other into a creepy figure is crossing a line that a weak disclaimer doesn't wipe away. If a vague acquaintance of yours wrote a sexually explicit fantasy featuring someone that was clearly you and published it to Literotica with that disclaimer, would you be OK with it?
posted by Candleman at 5:36 PM on July 9, 2021 [2 favorites]

One of my college roommates from hell published a poem that mentioned me unflatteringly. I have nothing but loathing for her but won't do anything to block it.

My great aunt was in Rasputin and the empress, playing the uncredited role of the countess who introduced them.
posted by brujita at 8:34 PM on July 9, 2021 [2 favorites]

It is Nowicki's choice to decide which aspects of her social media are public.
posted by brujita at 8:43 PM on July 9, 2021 [1 favorite]

I Love Dick slams because for many reasons that have little to do with irl Dick.
posted by mandymanwasregistered at 9:56 PM on July 9, 2021

slaps damn it, I meant slaps!
posted by mandymanwasregistered at 10:17 PM on July 9, 2021

Ann Arbor is on topic as it pertains to details of the story. Fantastic to see Ann Aborites comments about Shake. Can't count the encounters and sightings of Jake but only a few stand. The Orange Julius corner of Williams of it's there, Mom inside, I wondered out side, guitar case open theres Jake something about Leroy Carr. Mom was all "stay away from that jazz man" sorta Simpsons moment. My buddy and I would walk down Williams, stop at the Shant. There's Jake " The President used to go in there"
A gew arguments that stand out. First, stories "set"in Ann Arbor can be ambiguous but Saline gives it away.

I don't think Roupenian did anything wrong.
Legally you are correct unless a civil case is brought and that's usually not good lawyers say to both sides because of details again being re-hashed.
IMO, past morals, like alot of things in life and dealing with ethics and that line was crossed. Dunno, like a part of it was fictional Malice aforthought without the thinking it through research wise.
I don't think Nowicki would have written the article if Charles was alive. Agree, I really believe this. To do other wise would be frightfully garrish.
posted by clavdivs at 10:58 PM on July 9, 2021 [2 favorites]

bootlegpop, I was thinking of The Mind-Body Problem by Rebecca Goldstein, where people say a character is based on Saul Kripke. I don't find the character in question to be negative overall, but if it bothered Kripke that is certainly a data point.
posted by BibiRose at 11:11 PM on July 9, 2021

This is fascinating, because I recently found out, completely indirectly, that an extended family member had written "about" me as part of a short story and got awarded a prize, and fellow writers' recognition on Twitter for it.

My initial reaction was honestly that I do not want to be objectified as their art project / lab experiment. I still pretty much feel that way, so I feel this changes our relationship a bit and I'm not sure what I'd say if/when I meet them again.
posted by polymodus at 3:27 AM on July 10, 2021 [6 favorites]

It’s extremely telling here how many people took the publishing of this article as a prompt to write their take on Which Woman Was The Bad Woman?

You can empathize with both women! That’s okay!

You can also, I suspect, empathize with Charles, and think that what happened to him here both objectively sucked and was subjectively godawful for him. And you can probably do that even if you, understandably, raise an eyebrow at an age-gap relationship that extreme.

Anyway I relate to this because in high school I wrote a poem about how my uncle got way too competitive at minigolf and beach horseshoes and my mom shared it with him and I’m pretty sure he’s hated me ever since.
posted by rorgy at 4:59 AM on July 10, 2021 [25 favorites]

First, stories "set"in Ann Arbor can be ambiguous but Saline gives it away.

It would if there were any indication of how far away Saline is. Actually, it seems odd to me to go to Saline for two weeks and not see someone you're in a relationship with in Ann Arbor. In that way, Lansing, Bloomington, or Oberlin would make more sense. I would expect all of those to have art house theaters before the pandemic (impossible to tell now).

Use of Saline definitely makes the story more specific to Nowicki and seems like a detail that could easily have been changed.

Quality 16, the only business mentioned by name, does seem to be specific to Ann Arbor though. The other theaters in that chain have different names. (It seemed kind of sloppy to me to only mention one business by name and only use that name the second time the business is mentioned - I would have expected New Yorker editors to suggest more consistency.)
posted by FencingGal at 5:19 AM on July 10, 2021

You can also, I suspect, empathize with Charles, and think that what happened to him here both objectively sucked and was subjectively godawful for him. And you can probably do that even if you, understandably, raise an eyebrow at an age-gap relationship that extreme.

Yes! I am a woman and I empathize with Charles (and Alexis!) and personally I am somewhat frustrated that the default, after reading Alexis's account of things, seems to be not to empathize with him at all. Gender (and age) is a part of the picture, but not the whole picture.
posted by needs more cowbell at 5:59 AM on July 10, 2021 [14 favorites]

This is all reminding me of the Melanie lyric from the song Bitter Bad: If you do me wrong, I’ll put your first and last name in my rock and roll song.
posted by FencingGal at 6:31 AM on July 10, 2021 [2 favorites]

Anyway I relate to this because in high school I wrote a poem about how my uncle got way too competitive at minigolf and beach horseshoes and my mom shared it with him and I’m pretty sure he’s hated me ever since.

Pretty sure he doesn't hate you, he just felt used, and it almost seems authors' eloquence about empathy doesn't extend to their test subjects, just to fellow authors.
posted by polymodus at 11:39 AM on July 10, 2021 [4 favorites]

^^^(It seemed kind of sloppy to me to only mention one business by name and only use that name the second time the business is mentioned - I would have expected New Yorker editors to suggest more consistency.)

I say this not to to defend sloppiness, but to point out that whoever edited "Cat Person" for publication in The New Yorker may have been under more of a time crunch than usual.

The magazine is published 47 times a year; five of those issues cover two-week spans. One of those two-week issues is published at the end of the year.

"Cat Person" came out online Dec. 4, 2017, and in print Dec. 11, 2017. I kind of picture the bosses taking off for most or all of the month of December. The younger people with less seniority and social/cultural capital are left to do the heavy lifting of producing the magazine; they're scrambling to make deadline and not looking at anything they're reading as closely as they should because they just don't have the time and bandwidth.

Of course, this is just a guess, based on what I know about editing The New Yorker. Which itself draws heavily from various writers' memoirs and from that '80s artifact, Jay McInerney's novel Bright Lights, Big City (he briefly worked at the magazine as a fact checker). So please don't take my alternative scenario as anything more than the speculation that it is!
posted by virago at 12:32 AM on July 11, 2021 [1 favorite]

Interesting guess.

I would have expected New Yorker editors to suggest more consistency.

Manhattan is ten time larger population wise then Ann Arbor.

ambiguity.
posted by clavdivs at 9:24 PM on July 12, 2021 [1 favorite]

Slate has a follow-up interview with Nowicki
posted by a non mouse, a cow herd at 3:57 PM on July 16, 2021 [2 favorites]

« Older "I'm not good at communicating... I'm a woman, but... | "I Want to Have My Say" Newer »

This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments

MetaFilter

Cat Person and Me
July 8, 2021 6:36 AM Subscribe

Tags

Share

Cat Person and Me July 8, 2021 6:36 AM Subscribe

Tags

Share

Cat Person and Me
July 8, 2021 6:36 AM Subscribe