Meghan Daum
The Lessons of ‘Cat Person’
Author Kristen Roupenian on #MeToo, Aziz Ansari, and where we go from here
In December 2017, a piece of short fiction called “Cat Person” appeared in the New Yorker. The work of a then-unknown author named Kristen Roupenian, it told the story of a 20-year-old female college student’s date with a 34-year-old man and its emotional aftermath. Thanks in part to the alchemy of the moment (the #MeToo movement was in rapid ascent but, at least to some observers, starting to buckle from the pressures of its own G-force), the story did something fiction rarely does: It went viral. For several weeks, the names associated with the #MeToo conversation expanded to include not just the real-life figures like Harvey Weinstein, Matt Lauer, and Charlie Rose, but also the fictional characters Margot and Robert.
Public reaction to the story was not merely polarized but divided into thin slices of interpretation and projection and assumptions about the author’s intentions. Was Margot a victim? Was Robert a predator? Were either or both of them narcissistic manipulators, or were they just hapless casualties of the culture of texting and other digitally assisted relationship distortions? Was there even any use in parsing a work of fiction as though it were depicting an actual event?
