‘It took me utterly by surprise,’ says the writer Kristen Roupenian. If her name is familiar, you probably know which incident she’s referring to: the astonishing, international reaction to her short story, Cat Person. It was published in The New Yorker in December 2017 – and five days after it went online, it went seriously, wildly viral. ‘I was blindsided by it. It hadn’t crossed my mind even once that when the story came out, people were going to be sending me requests for think-pieces about #MeToo.’
Cat Person, to refresh your memory, is the story of Margot, 20, and 34-year-old Robert, who exchange numbers, develop a promising, flirtatious text chat over several weeks, then finally go on one awful date. We are in Margot’s head as she tries again and again to calculate who enigmatic Robert might be and what he thinks of her, ultimately enduring sex that she doesn't want to but feels too embarrassed to halt. The story’s queasy look at modern dating dynamics launched hundreds of response pieces about consent and the way we communicate, at least one satirical story written from Robert’s perspective, and an incel (‘involuntary celibate’) Twitter account that retweeted the reactions of men (‘ is happens to me all the time. Women just use me and cast me aside’).
Perhaps it shouldn’t have been surprising that the tale got the attention it did, bearing in mind the timing. When it emerged, we were in the eye of the storm of the #MeToo movement; it was two months after the first allegations against Harvey Weinstein, and weeks after the fall of Kevin Spacey and Louis CK. ‘I felt glad and proud that the story ended up doing the work that it did for #MeToo – providing a space for people to have conversations about their own personal experience,’ says Kristen. That doesn’t mean that she wanted to join in, however. ‘What I felt scared about was the idea that I myself could serve as a spokesperson. It takes me a long time to write a story, and when I’ve written it, it’s the best thing that I could possibly say about that particular subject. There are people so much better equipped to guide the conversation in terms of politics.’
What she can do, however, is serve up more thought-provoking fiction. is month sees the publication of You Know You Want is, a collection of stories that she mostly wrote before her viral moment (Cat Person is one of them), and reportedly sold afterwards for a $1.2m (£900,000) advance. Buy it, but be warned: it might not be quite what you’re expecting.
The first story, Bad Boy, is about a threesome that devolves into something deeply unpleasant – many of the others are just as disturbing. Some have elements of supernatural horror: squirming parasites, feral humans, black magic. Some critics have been appalled (a squeamish review in The Times said ‘These rancid fantasies made my flesh crawl’); personally, I found it unsettling but still thrilling, imaginative and often bleakly funny. ‘When you think about it, Cat Person also has the structure of a horror movie,’ Kristen points out. ‘You’re watching a girl go into a house and you’re thinking, “Don’t go into the house, don’t go into the house!” And she keeps going.
Kristen, 37, grew up in Boston where her father was a doctor and her mother a nurse. The book’s dedication reads, ‘For my mother, Carol Roupenian, who taught me to love what scares me’ – because it was from her mum’s bookshelf that she spent her childhood pilfering scary tales by Stephen King and Dean Koontz. The dedication has a deeper meaning, too: ‘There is a theme in a lot of my stories about people reaching towards the things that scare or hurt them, trying to move closer to what is terrifying in order to control it.’ With Cat Person in mind, I think this works pretty well as a metaphor for the perils of the dating world.
Beyond its most explicitly creepy moments, what the book really explores is how hard it is to truly know another person – and how often we tell ourselves the comforting lie that we’ve figured someone out. It’s in the way Margot constantly guesses at Robert’s feelings. It’s there again in the excellent The Good Guy, where we meet Ted, who has seduced woman after woman by designing a new persona for himself: a sensitive and attentive man, not like all the others. When he dumps them, they are outraged to discover that he’s not a good guy after all.
It’s a familiar and well-observed scenario, which Kristen takes to a grim extreme. While you shouldn’t expect her book of dark modern fairy tales to be an extended reflection on #MeToo, you can expect it to be – like Cat Person – as thought- provoking as it is uncomfortable.
‘You Know You Want This’ by Kristen Roupenian is published on 7 February, (£12.99, Jonathan Cape__)