Reply to Subject of famous/infamous New Yorker "Cat Person" short story revealed

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I'm a writer and I read the essay. I really don't think the premise of the essay is correct, at all. Roupenian wrote a story about a young woman having a relationship with an older man (an extremely common scenario) based on someone she knew of, and used details about a movie theater and a town name from that person's life. The story itself, the sexual encounter, the thoughts in the person's head--it's all fiction. The essayist herself says the second half of the story is not at all reflective of her relationship. The story went viral because of its universality, not because it was an accurate summation of the essayist's relationship with Charles.

Later, the essayist says it's making her second-guess the nature of her relationship with "Charles," but that seems silly, because her relationship was one thing and the imagined story is another. A person imagining your life doesn't have more acute insight into your life than you do, and it's stupid for her to entertain the possibility. I don't think R did anything wrong, though changing the town name might have been a good idea. [/quote]

You’re missing every possible point, how surprising. Have you done that level of lifting? It’s not creative, and her failure to swap or scrub the exact items that made the essayist’s friends guess she’d actually written the story shows the limits of Roupanian’s…everything. It’s such bullshit. I’ve read defenses like “if she’d swapped details it may have jeopardized publication!” Make that make sense please.

As for what you wrote below, girl, please. Yeah. Rachel Cusk totally had to use eerie details of her ex’s post-divorce gf to even start Outline. Wait, she didn’t? Wait, not everyone has to scour MyLife before they start typing? Oh you don’t say.  [/quote]

Either I'm missing your point, or you're missing mine, but Rachel Cusks's work is intensely autobiographical, so that's a weird counterexample.[/quote]

Yes - you are. She scrubs and transforms everything into actual universality. I am somewhat amazed at writers not seeing any space between that and CP. Maybe you should poll the friends and family you’ve lifted from if you’re still unable to make the distinction. [/quote]

Does she, though? Do you know her ex-husband well? Does he agree that he's been "scrubbed" into universality, or does he not care that he bears a lot of similarities to the character of the ex-husband in her work? Certainly there are a lot of undisguised similarities: what he does for a living, where he lives, the number and sex of his children, his age, background.

I know a lot of writers, and I have appeared fictionally in other writers' work (or at least, someone with superficial, specific similarities to me has appeared in their work), and although it's a little funny, it's not something I would write an essay about or think has much to do with me. It's still the author's work.

Oneof the things I enjoy about literary biography is learning about the real-world models for the characters in novels I love.
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