cat person

it's underneath if it comes out only at the dead end of the relationship, after like a dozen unanswered texts, as the last line of the story.

also i think the fact that it connects, at the last possible second, the nuanced and pathetic image you have in your head and the image of an alt-right shitposter, is pretty deliberate.

ime one of the only truly powerful instruments a 20 year old woman wields is her ability to charm easily charmed men*

this is rly otm and i liked the stuff w her job at the art theatre: the way he blows up its sophistication first in flattery but gradually in anxious bitterness and insecurity was v true to the usual dynamic between older lonely men w what they think of as taste and younger women whose intelligence they praise until the day it stops working.

(the praise, not the intelligence)

it IS underneath!! he is hiding it, even from himself. it only comes out and breaks his veneer of decency when he knows she is no longer interested (again, her decision) he is robbed/"robbed" of his control over the situation and he lashes out (drunkenly) with what is buried beneath the flirting and jokes and attentive question asking and his urbane apartment and everything. anger at having his control taken away by a young woman he slept with, a person with whom he assumed (incorrectly) that he had the upper hand.

he is not an MRA shitposter -- he is a regular guy. otherwise she wouldn't have spent as much time with him as she did.

it's also a fairly difficult technical problem to have this mentality submerged but not overt when the story is first-person from her perspective

"Later, the bartender told me that he'd written 'whore' to me into the text window, but decided to erase it."

i dunno, i just think him saying that stops him being a regular guy. you don't just call someone a "whore". even thinking "she is a fucking whore" or whatever would be p strange. guess we're going round in circles.

if he's texting women calling them whores he is an mra shitposter, de facto.

i guess i just disagree with that

i think it's important to note that i don't think the author is portraying either of the characters as predatory; it's worse than that. this is business as usual.

a few years ago just turned thirty i hooked up with a girl that was i believe 19 maybe 20 at a and this is a creepy detail a 17 year old girl's birthday party that i went to with friends from work NOT KNOWING it was a 17 year old girl's birthday party. driving home the next morning, she asked how old i was and i couldn't even say it and had to shakingly pull out my drivers license wordlessly pass it to her. she said, comfortingly: no, it's cool, my friend is dating a guy who's like 42. i was smitten with her, got her phone number, texted once, got no response and agonized for a few days about sending a follow up but never did. about a week later? she said she was in the mountains skiing and hadn't gotten my message but she wasn't interested, and i never saw her again.

i can relate, folks. tbf this guy does seem like an mra shitposter right off the bat. story was okay.

xp So many details were true to life and experience imo. I want to use the words "gross" and "banal" somehow but both already seem cliched.

he should have used them about the student bar she suggested

he seemed insecure for sure -- would not extrapolate that to "MRA shitposter"

yeah clearly insecure and i definitely understand that part of it. i dunno, the slightly manipulative exchange at the counter starts it off, the way he suggests jokingly that she insulted him, referring to her as "concession-stand girl."

those were the parts that to me are creepy and more strongly so if the ending isn't as overt

i enjoyed this story. guy seems like a dickhead from the get-go but that isn't a flaw in the story to me

seems cool that a piece of fiction went viral. although obviously i had a quick look on twitter and saw some of the worst takes ever. someone who found it fatphobic. chuds arguing that the girl is "the baddy".

The way he withholds recognition and respect, uses small denigrations, pretends to take offense to stay on the offensive, is textbook. Seen it, lived it, dated it. Also struck by, on her part, the multiple times she's aware that she's smarter, abler than him but gets nervous or retreats into imagining the fantasy/image instead of taking control of the situation and being done with him. That she's almost afraid? to expose him, or to find out what could happen if she lets him down.

Her instincts here are probably good, which is what the end is telling us, but even without the literalness of the last lines it's just the water we swim in. Seeing someone be sure that they're better than you and know that they're wrong but keeping that secret for reasons of your own...protection, politeness, or finding a tiny sliver of power in being underestimated. Not realizing that you had so much power at your fingertips all along if you just claimed it instead of settling for the tiny bit that you had to deal with all their shit for.

yeah this story stings both ways

lots of good posts on this thread!

i really liked the story. i think it speaks to a transactional sense of entitlement commonly found among Nice Guys that is rooted in misogyny.

posts on this thread more interesting (to me) than the original story tbh

a good writing exercise would be to write this same story w the male as the narrator

^^ or have the same author alternate woman & male narrators

i feel like i've read this story a thousand times from the man's perspective

La Lech otm throughout this thread.

I saw this story was going viral because of the ending and was expecting some sort of Shirley Jackson/Alan Moore futureshock twist - like, maybe it's called Cat Person because it turns out that he is **literally a half cat half person** - and sou was relieved by the actual ending.

I'm 40 and have been in a relationship for 15 years - and I totally saw this guy as the nightmare alternative me if I'd stayed single. We might not be that guy right now, but everyone has the potential to be that guy.

Aside from that I thought it was a funny and super-relatable piece, OTM about bad one night stands and how crushes can suddenly curdle in an instant. And I'm not sure it's fair to ascribe gimickiness to a piece that never sought its virality.

That said - I thought the last couple Curtis Sittenfeld stories (also about bad one night stands) were better.

Certainly have read this story quite a bit from a man's perspective - not sure texting would be adding (too much) of a new angle on it either.

xpost

even so, comparing/contrasting two voices sheds new light on both. reading the male side of the story from the (female) author's perspective could be unpredictable, revealing. just the kind of imaginative leap that fiction (as opposed to straight autobiography or memoir) not only allows but requires.

talking form not content here

as a single dude with a cat I feel I should weigh in and say ... my cat rules

I don't need to see the guy's side of the story, I've read and seen that countless times before (and not just from make writers)

Wanting to see this from the guy's side seems like a subconscious desire to excuse the guy's behaviour. But it's ok for him to remain an unknowable asshole. Ambiguity is also a thing fiction does.

(Male writers, I mean, sorry)

You don't seem very ambiguous about it

genuinely curious, where are the countless stories like this by a male narrator

m coleman is right i suggested it more as to form, not at all to defend/justify the actions by either party.

how abt if this female writer herself wrote a vers from the male narrators pov, would everyone still be as dismissive / not want to read it?

while i agree that i haven't read countless examples of this scenario from a male perspective the idea that someone's reaction to this story would be "i would like to read this from the man's perspective" seems beyond banal and wrong as a reaction to this story

“When u laguehd when I asked if you were a virgin was it because youd fucked so many guys”
“Are you fucking that guy right now”
“Is someone getting the best"
"the best"
"the best"
"the best"
"of you."

i like it fine on its own terms & think its well-observed and engaging fwiw

i speculated it might be *interesting* to read from multiple points of view. and that's "beyond banal" or "wrong" or jesus subconsciously excusing this creep's behavior?

bidding ILX a fond adieu

imo the male perspective is p much already there. for instance by the end you are as aware of the emotion induced in him by her laugh as you are of the emotion in her that caused it. so is she. having read this version of the story i felt pretty clear on what had happened to both the characters. the reverse however would not be true: he does not know even at the end what she is feeling and a story from his pov would not incorporate hers. huh.

very good post

Oh that is very neat.

Interesting that her interview suggests she was trying to see things from his side anyway (sorta):

The first draft of the story came fairly easily—I wrote it in a feverish burst—but I did feel self-conscious, afterward, about the verisimilitude of the texts, especially because Margot is younger than I am and there’s nothing more embarrassing than someone older trying to mimic the communication style of a slightly different generation. There are fewer of her texts in the story for that reason. I liked writing Robert’s side of the conversation, on the other hand, in part because I felt like I was his analogue as a writer: both of us were trying to imitate how someone younger would talk, always on the verge of a slip that would give the game away.

i really liked the story. i think it speaks to a transactional sense of entitlement commonly found among Nice Guys that is rooted in misogyny.

don't see this narrator self-identifying as a nice guy tbh. he's not a particularly fleshed out character tho.

genuinely curious, where are the countless stories like this by a male narrator

good question imo. so many people saying "we've all read this story" - don't think so - if it's actually written by this author i don't think we can assume we've already read that story.

he does not know even at the end what she is feeling and a story from his pov would not incorporate hers

it's possible to show things by absence. one of the things i don't like about this story is that the reader doesn't get to know more than the character.

Are you saying you can't think of any stories or novels written by men about male misogynists?

he's not a particularly fleshed out character tho

That's a fair critique though - one person's archetype is another person's "too unspecific"

nobody said "a man should rewrite this story" tbf - i also think upthread people are misinterpreting m coleman's post. i read as "it'd be interesting to see this author tell this story from the male's perspective" as "this needs to be more fair to the male character by telling his side of the story"

the two things are p different. the first, while obv just some idle musing, might be interesting, right?

sorry meant to say people seem to be interpreting his post as "this needs to be more fair to the male character by telling his side of the story"

I super recommend the interview - she's good at explaining what she was doing (e.g. by making the guy so thinly drawn) without overexplaining it

https://www.newyorker.com/books/this-week-in-fiction/fiction-this-week-kristen-roupenian-2017-12-11

I linked it above. Its good, there'll be a lot of pressure on whatever she does next.

In her twitter she also linked this reaction piece: https://elladawson.com/2017/12/09/bad-sex-or-the-sex-we-dont-want-but-have-anyway/

I know that both perspectives are strongly in there but...many of the readings are tied to your biography and history, and so we also test our feelings against the writer of the piece, who happens to be a woman.

I was actually thinking of some names re: the male perspective. Immediately after I finished this story last night I wanted to read Pavese's "The Suicides" (i'll pick it up, think I left it at my parents' bookcase lol) just this highly corrosive story of an affair completely gone wrong. Maybe Moravia's Boredom for an age-gap story. Or Radiguet's Count D'Orgel's Ball from a young male perspective, this time an affair with a married older woman. I think a few of Schnitzler's short stories would count here too.

Also it might usually be to do with those stories re-counting an academic Male to female student r/ship. But I've never engaged with it (just sounds like a total waste of time). I do remember seeing a twitter thread from a woman about a couple of months ago who couldn't quite believe what she is reading.

I also don't really get when men feel the need to "take the man's side" (or whatever) in a piece of fiction, as if it's impossible to identify or find commonalities with a female character

...

the reverse however would not be true: he does not know even at the end what she is feeling and a story from his pov would not incorporate hers. huh.

― difficult listening hour, Monday, December 11, 2017 2:03 PM (two hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is a great breakdown, dlh!

The author's take on how Margot's constantly shifting in her guesses of Robert's motivations and inner self which rings true to me. Some people have commented that it seems she's projecting, which seems off. I don't know that anyone can take someone else purely on the basis of their actions, and we all bring prior knowledge, hopes, even ideals to the table. It does feel like Robert's projecting throughout the story, but it's almost completely about externalities -- not what Margot would want, or why, but purely judgments on things she does and chooses.

I keep thinking about my college creative nonfiction writing course and how this is very similar in style to the work a lot of my classmates wrote, and not far from some of the themes, but it exceeds anything we came up with in execution. I wish I'd pushed myself harder at the time, but writing in this way is difficult and I felt like the experience really indicted my own sense of introspection and my understanding of others.

In a sense, I recognize both of these people.

<i>the story was v successful at casting a kind of awful vibe where a perceptive, intelligent woman drifts from one impulse to another without feeling able to stand up for her own shifting feelings, or even declare them</i>

this resonated with me--i read this as a particularly gendered and truthful experience of a certain kind of sexual encounter, but maybe a man would also participate in this type of extremely unfullfiling sex without trying to do anything to change the encounter (?)

I think the changes necessary to make it plausible, or at least plausible in a commonplace way, would also make it into a much different situation

I think Robert is supposed to be an MRA/pickup artist type, not an everyman. From the beginning he is always putting the narrator down or else ignoring or belittling her. He never takes a genuine interest in her life, to the point where it seems calculated. In each of their interactions, his first priority is to protect his ego. He’s more pitiable than loathsome, though he is that too. People like that — closed off, cruel people — are not even truly alive. You can’t imagine him loving anyone. The fact that there is a cottage industry training people to be like that is, you know, horrifying.

Any man can become like Robert in the sense that everyone is capable of killing the best parts of themselves, but he is really far gone in my view. There are people like him, and they are legion, but there is nothing ordinary about this pathological sort of existence no matter how common it is.