7 ms·

Isn't there a villain, though? A creepy internet stalker writes a story about her stalkee's life, monetizes it and gets critical acclaim (and, again, a seven-fi

by caslon 5y ago

Isn't there a villain, though? A creepy internet stalker writes a story about her stalkee's life, monetizes it and gets critical acclaim (and, again, a seven-figure advance for a collection of short stories that only had value due to that story) for it, causing her strife? I can't help but feel that there's a clear villain here, and a villain that's trying to paint herself as the victim at that.

afavour 5y ago
I dunno, if “looked through social media posts of my partner with their ex” is stalking then there are a lot of stalkers out there in the world in new relationships. Don’t get me wrong, turning that into a story with a few too many true-to-life details would absolutely weird me out too. But I’m not sure she’s a stalking villain.
- bartread 5y ago
  > if “looked through social media posts of my partner with their ex” is stalking then there are a lot of stalkers out there in the world in new relationships. Most of them don't wildly profit from what their partners might possibly consider to be at least a slightly unsavoury activity though.
  - afavour 5y ago
    If she’d lifted photos from his profile and published them for profit I’d agree with you. But using the photos of their relationship as inspiration for a fictional story is a much more tenuous connection. And it’s not as if the author directly wrote it with the intention to profit, the story was a huge success in a way that surprised everyone. It isn’t the story of this woman’s relationship, she herself attests to that. It’s a story inspired by the evidence of her relationship. If asked I bet a lot of authors would say they base their stories on some kind of real world experience, does that mean they all owe royalties? IMO one of the really interesting parts of this essay is the ambiguity. She’s upset, and upset at the author, but isn’t entirely sure if what happened was actually wrong, or what any of it means. I find that a lot more powerful than trying to cast people as unambiguous heroes or villains.
tptacek 5y ago
Lots of fiction writers use real people as the bases for characters; that doesn't make them "creepy internet stalkers". Cat Person was a work of fiction. There wasn't much ambiguity about that.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- refulgentis 5y ago
  There's tons of ambiguity about it, hence this article and fascination with it, no? It raises the very interesting problem that literally everything about it was true, in a creepy, overly detailed way that indicates obsession, other than the horrible way it painted the man involved. Very, very, strange situation.
  - tptacek 5y ago
    It ran in the Fiction section of the New Yorker. No reasonable person is confused about this.
    - refulgentis 5y ago
      I can't tell if you're really mad about the article and think the author is unreasonable, or if you think I'm being unreasonable, so I'll just respond as if you're looking for evidence that this, at least somewhat, ambiguous: > “Cat Person,” and the cultural reception to it, feels connected to the broader literary debate over “autofiction”—writing that, in its raw and confessional style, seems to blur the boundaries between the real and the invented.
      - tptacek 5y ago
        "Fiction" is literally in the word "autofiction". The term means "fictional autobiography". You may have confused it with "roman à clef", which nobody says Cat Person is. We do have a term for "fiction inspired in part by real stories"; it's "fiction".
prvc 5y ago
A superficial appraisal of the situation would have Cat Person be a mere amalgam of details plagiarized from social media with an ideologically derived ersatz-archetype-- a lie bolstered by purloined facts. This article, however, brings for the first time depth and truth to the former text. Flaubert famously quipped, "Madame Bovary, c'est moi!". In the same vein, the ugly side of Cat Person's male character may not have derived merely from defamatory stereotypes, as many readers could have been forgiven for assuming, rather it may, too, have been drawn from life. Very good article. Moving, and oddly redemptive.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- sdwr 5y ago
  https://www.bulwer-lytton.com/ https://www.bulwer-lytton.com/ What are you trying to say? This comment made me the most upset×angry I've ever been on HN. Feels like an abuse of language.
  - prvc 5y ago
    The Victorian era was a high-point for our language, in my view.
  - GeoAtreides 5y ago
    It's not abuse, it didn't even registered to me as something special, and I'm an ESL speaker. Some people, by dint of having read many books, have a rich vocabulary and use it without giving any thought to how well-read (or not) are their interlocutors.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
- sgt101 5y ago
  Surely that's how all characters are constructed - from the authors imagination? Where else can they come from but via the lens of the writer?
scandox 5y ago
This is a very slippery slope. Writers imbibe all kinds of details from life, from gossip, from their families....writers are interested in people's lives. The only difference here is the apparently stark difference of her using social media as her source of detail. But it's really no different than if she read a newspaper article about someone online and borrowed detail from that. Perhaps the only crime here, if crime there be, is an artistic one: the story is just a bit shallow.
- sgt101 5y ago
  It's a pretty good story though - much to admire about it.
sgt101 5y ago
But it wasn't about the "stalkee's life" it was an imagined story inspired by imagined characters inspired by the situation she observed. Cat Person wasn't like Charles - Charles seems to have been someone else entirely. I can imagine going to a BBQ and meeting Charles and liking him, I don't think that would be the case with Cat Person. The people who are the villains are the ones who looked at Charles and decided that Charles was Cat Person - they are like people who look at blond girls and think "idiot" and people who look at black people and think... well I won't go into what racists think. It's not the same - but it's similar, it's prejudice - less harsh and less pervasive, but it's how dumb people operate.
vidarh 5y ago
You can see it as a villain, but the way it is presented it does not seem Nowicki sees Roupenian as a villain (though maybe she did at one point). I think the essay is more subtle than that. She ends by describing "what's difficult about having your relationship rewritten and memorialized", rather than any sharp criticism. She describes herself as angry and frustrated earlier, but having appreciated that Roupenian was sorry. It's quite nuanced. A lot of the essay also focuses more on other peoples (real world) interpretation of her relationship, rather than on the fictional story ("My relationship with Charles was full of shame brought on by people who assumed the worst—a predatory man asserting his power over an innocent girl"). Part of the essay focuses on how the story "blurs the boundaries between the real and the invented" but also how that affected both Charles and her in that it made him question whether he had acted like the fictional character, and "sometimes, to my own disappointment, I find myself inclined to trust Roupenian over myself" about her relationship. The essay is just as much about how we tend to assume a lot of fiction is truer than it is when it includes even some details from reality - to the point where Nowicki finds herself trusting a total strangers interpretation of her own relationship - a relationship said stranger had never observed directly. A key line to me is "I’ve wondered a lot about the line between fiction and nonfiction, and what license is actually bestowed by the act of labeling something as fiction." This seems to get at the core of what this essay is, with Roupenian being more of a prop to discuss this subject grounded in a real situation than a villain per se. Almost every negative about Roupenian is accompanied by a counterpoint, that while not entirely negating what is often critical does soften it. E.g "At times I’ve convinced myself that she wanted us to know it was about us" - something that if true would certainly tip Roupenian into villain territory - is followed by "But then I remind myself that when she wrote “Cat Person,” she was still in her MFA program. No one knew her name. Submitting a story to the New Yorker was a long shot, and a piece of literary short fiction had never gone viral in this way." It also goes towards making the argument that Roupenian was likely more toughtless than malicious, and that her thoughtlessness was somewhat understandable and would have meant very little if not for accidents of circumstance. Does it put Roupenian in a somewhat negative light? Sure. It was stupid and thoughtless of her not to change details. But villain? I don't think she's important enough even to this essay, to be the villain of it. She plays a perfunctory part of a much more interesting story about Alexis and Charles, their relationship, and how seeing it reflected in the fictional story affected them.

by caslon 5y ago

afavour 5y ago

I dunno, if “looked through social media posts of my partner with their ex” is stalking then there are a lot of stalkers out there in the world in new relationships. Don’t get me wrong, turning that into a story with a few too many true-to-life details would absolutely weird me out too. But I’m not sure she’s a stalking villain.

bartread 5y ago
> if “looked through social media posts of my partner with their ex” is stalking then there are a lot of stalkers out there in the world in new relationships. Most of them don't wildly profit from what their partners might possibly consider to be at least a slightly unsavoury activity though.
- afavour 5y ago
  If she’d lifted photos from his profile and published them for profit I’d agree with you. But using the photos of their relationship as inspiration for a fictional story is a much more tenuous connection. And it’s not as if the author directly wrote it with the intention to profit, the story was a huge success in a way that surprised everyone. It isn’t the story of this woman’s relationship, she herself attests to that. It’s a story inspired by the evidence of her relationship. If asked I bet a lot of authors would say they base their stories on some kind of real world experience, does that mean they all owe royalties? IMO one of the really interesting parts of this essay is the ambiguity. She’s upset, and upset at the author, but isn’t entirely sure if what happened was actually wrong, or what any of it means. I find that a lot more powerful than trying to cast people as unambiguous heroes or villains.

tptacek 5y ago

Lots of fiction writers use real people as the bases for characters; that doesn't make them "creepy internet stalkers". Cat Person was a work of fiction. There wasn't much ambiguity about that.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
refulgentis 5y ago
There's tons of ambiguity about it, hence this article and fascination with it, no? It raises the very interesting problem that literally everything about it was true, in a creepy, overly detailed way that indicates obsession, other than the horrible way it painted the man involved. Very, very, strange situation.
- tptacek 5y ago
  It ran in the Fiction section of the New Yorker. No reasonable person is confused about this.
  - refulgentis 5y ago
    I can't tell if you're really mad about the article and think the author is unreasonable, or if you think I'm being unreasonable, so I'll just respond as if you're looking for evidence that this, at least somewhat, ambiguous: > “Cat Person,” and the cultural reception to it, feels connected to the broader literary debate over “autofiction”—writing that, in its raw and confessional style, seems to blur the boundaries between the real and the invented.
    - tptacek 5y ago
      "Fiction" is literally in the word "autofiction". The term means "fictional autobiography". You may have confused it with "roman à clef", which nobody says Cat Person is. We do have a term for "fiction inspired in part by real stories"; it's "fiction".

prvc 5y ago

A superficial appraisal of the situation would have Cat Person be a mere amalgam of details plagiarized from social media with an ideologically derived ersatz-archetype-- a lie bolstered by purloined facts. This article, however, brings for the first time depth and truth to the former text. Flaubert famously quipped, "Madame Bovary, c'est moi!". In the same vein, the ugly side of Cat Person's male character may not have derived merely from defamatory stereotypes, as many readers could have been forgiven for assuming, rather it may, too, have been drawn from life. Very good article. Moving, and oddly redemptive.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
sdwr 5y ago
https://www.bulwer-lytton.com/ https://www.bulwer-lytton.com/ What are you trying to say? This comment made me the most upset×angry I've ever been on HN. Feels like an abuse of language.
- prvc 5y ago
  The Victorian era was a high-point for our language, in my view.
- GeoAtreides 5y ago
  It's not abuse, it didn't even registered to me as something special, and I'm an ESL speaker. Some people, by dint of having read many books, have a rich vocabulary and use it without giving any thought to how well-read (or not) are their interlocutors.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
sgt101 5y ago
Surely that's how all characters are constructed - from the authors imagination? Where else can they come from but via the lens of the writer?

scandox 5y ago

This is a very slippery slope. Writers imbibe all kinds of details from life, from gossip, from their families....writers are interested in people's lives. The only difference here is the apparently stark difference of her using social media as her source of detail. But it's really no different than if she read a newspaper article about someone online and borrowed detail from that. Perhaps the only crime here, if crime there be, is an artistic one: the story is just a bit shallow.

sgt101 5y ago
It's a pretty good story though - much to admire about it.

sgt101 5y ago

But it wasn't about the "stalkee's life" it was an imagined story inspired by imagined characters inspired by the situation she observed. Cat Person wasn't like Charles - Charles seems to have been someone else entirely. I can imagine going to a BBQ and meeting Charles and liking him, I don't think that would be the case with Cat Person. The people who are the villains are the ones who looked at Charles and decided that Charles was Cat Person - they are like people who look at blond girls and think "idiot" and people who look at black people and think... well I won't go into what racists think. It's not the same - but it's similar, it's prejudice - less harsh and less pervasive, but it's how dumb people operate.

vidarh 5y ago

You can see it as a villain, but the way it is presented it does not seem Nowicki sees Roupenian as a villain (though maybe she did at one point). I think the essay is more subtle than that. She ends by describing "what's difficult about having your relationship rewritten and memorialized", rather than any sharp criticism. She describes herself as angry and frustrated earlier, but having appreciated that Roupenian was sorry. It's quite nuanced. A lot of the essay also focuses more on other peoples (real world) interpretation of her relationship, rather than on the fictional story ("My relationship with Charles was full of shame brought on by people who assumed the worst—a predatory man asserting his power over an innocent girl"). Part of the essay focuses on how the story "blurs the boundaries between the real and the invented" but also how that affected both Charles and her in that it made him question whether he had acted like the fictional character, and "sometimes, to my own disappointment, I find myself inclined to trust Roupenian over myself" about her relationship. The essay is just as much about how we tend to assume a lot of fiction is truer than it is when it includes even some details from reality - to the point where Nowicki finds herself trusting a total strangers interpretation of her own relationship - a relationship said stranger had never observed directly. A key line to me is "I’ve wondered a lot about the line between fiction and nonfiction, and what license is actually bestowed by the act of labeling something as fiction." This seems to get at the core of what this essay is, with Roupenian being more of a prop to discuss this subject grounded in a real situation than a villain per se. Almost every negative about Roupenian is accompanied by a counterpoint, that while not entirely negating what is often critical does soften it. E.g "At times I’ve convinced myself that she wanted us to know it was about us" - something that if true would certainly tip Roupenian into villain territory - is followed by "But then I remind myself that when she wrote “Cat Person,” she was still in her MFA program. No one knew her name. Submitting a story to the New Yorker was a long shot, and a piece of literary short fiction had never gone viral in this way." It also goes towards making the argument that Roupenian was likely more toughtless than malicious, and that her thoughtlessness was somewhat understandable and would have meant very little if not for accidents of circumstance. Does it put Roupenian in a somewhat negative light? Sure. It was stupid and thoughtless of her not to change details. But villain? I don't think she's important enough even to this essay, to be the villain of it. She plays a perfunctory part of a much more interesting story about Alexis and Charles, their relationship, and how seeing it reflected in the fictional story affected them.