Imagine a story about Charles the software developer, who lives in Chicago, being a horrible, predatory romantic partner.

Not trying to imply that you are one of course, but that’s about as much detail she changed from the real life story—just the names. And now it was so successful that there’s going to be made about it starring Cousin Greg from HBO’s Succession. People love to gossip and will eventually put two and two together.

She didn't change "just the names". As the Slate article observes, she changes half the story. That's what people are mad about: that her work of fiction is mostly fictional.

The half she kept is the identifying details other than names of the actual, real-life people she based it on - so much so that their friends immediately recognised them in the story - and the half she changed is stuff internal to their relationship that those friends would have no way of identifying as false and that seemingly fits their existing sterotype-based assumptions better than the actual reality would've.

I believe it's which half of the story she fictionalised which bothers people.

She didn't take two fictionalised people and give them someone's perfectly normal, boring sex life.

Instead she took two real people including detailed descriptions of them accurate enough that they could later be correctly identified.

She then twisted their relationship to make one a victim and the other, her former romantic parter, a cartoon misogynist.

Those that recognise the people involved may well still think "well there's no smoke without fire" regardless of her claim that it's all "fictional".

This is exactly it. I've seen nobody upset that Roupenian borrowed details, but at keeping enough details unchanged to give room for those who recognise the people to question which part is fiction and which is true in a way that casts shadows over the people it was at least party based on.

> people are mad about: that her work of fiction is mostly fictional

It's mostly fictional but apparently it comes across as true to many people on first glance. There is also a real world person which apparently many readers see an obvious link to. Regardless of how it all looks to you, surely you can appreciate how such a situation could give rise to a negative viewpoint?

I think it says something bad about contemporary writing that "comes accross as true" is exceptional.

"Based on a true story."

It's not fiction. It's taking the personal relationship of two people and editorialising it to turn it into something it wasn't - for personal gain and political status - while causing the people in it genuine pain and grief.

It's a form of appropriation. If it was mostly fictional it could have started from a different premise and used different characters.

The character space that authors can work in is unimaginably vast, and there was no need at all to use personal experiences to "borrow" detail when some imagined experiences would have done the job just as well.

In reality the the impact of the story comes from the people it's based on - not from the creative imagination of the author, who took their private lives and feelings and distorted them into a saleable feminist parable.

If I wrote a story about ptkecat, accurately included most of the broad details about your life, but then inserted some fictional ones that portrayed you as a lying, manipulative person, would you consider that to be fictional? Would you be unjustified in being angry about it?

Worse, she injected her own experiences/narrative into a real couple's relationship details that other people also knew about. That's probably the fiction part.

Do you think you would still feel this was unambiguously fiction if you were in Charles or Alexis’ shoes?

I wouldn't so much feel it was fiction so much as I would know it if I were Alexis.

"All true your honor, but I said the word fiction beforehand!"

If what you said ran in the fiction section of the New Yorker, that would indeed be a very strong defense against a defamation claim.

Curiously, not as strong as one might think.

"Judge Robert D. Sack of the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, author of the defamation treatise, Sack on Defamation: Libel, Slander and Related Problems, describes when a libel suit might result from a work of fiction:

“Where the defendant invents defamatory dialogue or other defamatory details in what purports to be nonfiction, uses actual people as fictional characters, or bases fictional characters on living persons but fails sufficiently to disguise the characters, so that the fictional characters are understood to be ‘of and concerning’ their living models, liability for libel may result.”" (emphasis added)

https://www.freedomforuminstitute.org/first-amendment-center...

There's an AP Herbert book called "Uncommon Law", in which one of the (fictional) cases involves a crossword-setter (Mr. Haddock) who is sued for setting puzzles with defamatory clues.

For example, "Bibulous bishop". That could be any bishop, except that the space for the solution, and the other intersecting answers, narrow the field considerably, to the point that the solver is forced to conclude that Bishop XYZ is the solution.

If you follow the Assange case, then you might see a strong similarity with the idea of "jigsaw identification".

The link you've provided is interesting, but the gist of it is that it's very unlikely that you can successfully sue someone for basing a fictional story off of you; you might be able to drag them into court, but the case is difficult to win.

Fiction uses false statements about reality in order to (attempt to) describe a deeper truth. Cat Person uses true factual details (in addition to false ones) in order to concoct a lie. In that sense, it is the opposite of our usual notion of fiction.

I think this is one of those things that sounds clever and sort of seems like it must make sense, but on closer inspection doesn't hold together at all. As you yourself pointed out on this thread, the history of story writers incorporating the stories of real people into their work goes back centuries. Nor can a work of fiction "concoct a lie", at least beyond the sense that all fiction is a lie.

I think this is one of those threads where we're all trying to reason axiomatically about what fiction is, and it's taking us to some very weird nerd-alternate-reality places. We can just approach the problem empirically; in the 20th century alone, there are dozens of fiction writers who are famous for doing what the author of Cat Person did.

But the article here makes it clear it was fiction - Charles wasn't that guy, "the hostile text messages were alien to me".

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.

It ran in the Fiction section of the New Yorker. No reasonable person is confused about this.

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.

"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".

Just to clarify - if someone wrote a fictional autobiography whose subject was obviously you, would that not bother you?

I would certainly be bothered if a close friend or family member did that to me in a manner that could ever lead strangers back to me. Nor would I ever publish such a piece about one of my acquaintances without their permission.

I find the notion that such behavior could be socially acceptable quite strange.

Again: the problem I have with this argument is that it's just coming up now, despite literally centuries of fiction built out of just these kinds of stories. I don't believe this is a real concern; it's a fake concern that we're being asked to have by a Slate article. It's interesting, and I'm happy to bounce the thought around, because that's what we're here for. But, come on.

I am guessing you aren't a fan of Citizen Kane. Or how about stories that even bill themselves as based on real events like Accidental Billionaires/The Social Network? Those must be even worse if they bill themselves as the truth. Could you imagine if most people judged your personality off made up dialogue and stories told by someone who was suing you for billions of dollars?

>I am guessing you aren't a fan of Citizen Kane.

William Randolph Hearst certainly wasn't one!

Fiction isn't the binary you are asserting here.

In fact, libelous material is by definition fictional - imputing someone's character by making stuff up.

Now I think that this is fiction, but it is definitely skirting the line and the author should probably have changed a few more details.

Libelous material is typically presented as fact.

Oh yeah, I agree. I do think a thinly disguised essay passed off as fiction could be libellous, though. And to reiterate, I don't think the Cat Person piece is libellous.

You're right, I can see it from that perspective. I find it somewhat zen in that it then becomes befuddling the author of this article injected herself into the Cat Person author's story...I do then give up & weep for the poor girl whose life this was who needs to be told she has no business injecting herself via a story about the story someone wrote about her life, this line of argument is far too meta for me for midnight EST. Cheers.

I'm not sure what inconsistency you're pointing out; if I was related to John Updike I would not be happy if I ended up as a villain in one of his books. Wouldn't anyone not enjoy that?

As a relatively famous silicon valley person, it might actually happen to you some day, and although it would probably never happen to me I can imagine empathizing with you if you ever ended up as the bad guy in a short story.

I assume whomever bases a fictional character after me will at least get the detail right that I live in Chicago, not Silicon Valley.