Let’s do the easy part first and agree to keep it in mind for the rest of the review: You Know You Want This: Cat Person and Other Stories by Kristen Roupenian is a book that remains present long after reading. It’s what everyone who enjoys horror should be reading. It’s what everyone who enjoys feminist lit should be reading, too. Also fairy tales. And dark humor. It’s a book that falls within the tradition of writers like Mary Shelley (Frankenstein), Shirley Jackson (The Haunting of Hill House), and Kelly Link (Get in Trouble). All the women writers who have looked at the genre, over the centuries, cracked their knuckles and said, “That’s cute and all, but here’s how to really do horror,” and put out books that leave you utterly lost in a darkened funhouse.
Got that? Okay.
“Cat Person,” for those unfamiliar, was a short story that appeared in The New Yorker in December 2017 and went viral. Despite the fact that viral short fiction was, and still is, practically unheard of, it was easy to see why. The story chronicles Margot, the protagonist’s, nebulous relationship with a socially awkward older man. The pinnacle scene, in which Margot has sex with the man even though she doesn’t really want to, because getting it over with and going home is less dangerous than rejecting him, richly articulates an experience that is extremely common, but rarely discussed. The fact that the story came out during the dawn of the Me Too movement was icing on the cake, readership-wise. It found a way to talk about something that is notoriously hard to talk about, at a moment when we most needed to talk about it.
Even two years later, ask anyone if they remember “Cat Person” and there’s a good chance they’ll know what you mean. Ask if the name “Kristen Roupenian” means anything to them, however, and you’ll hear crickets. Nobody looks at the bylines on viral articles, so the connection was lost before it could ever be made.
Last January, a post on some social media site linked me to “The Good Guy,” advertised as “a new story by the author of Cat Person.” The author of Cat Person, of course, not Kristen Roupenian. After reading the title and the first sentence (“By the time he was 35, the only way Ted could get hard and remain so for the duration of sexual intercourse was to pretend that his dick was a knife, and the woman he was fucking was stabbing herself with it.”), I closed the window, content that I had probably gotten everything I was going to get out of the story.
I finally read “The Good Guy” in its entirety when I picked up You Know You Want This, which also came out last January. As it turns out, I was right: “The Good Guy” is exactly what you would expect a story called “The Good Guy, by the author of Cat Person” to be. It’s a fifty-page fugue of Ted’s relationships with women over the course of his life. The crux of the story is that he is not, in fact, a good guy, but a sleazy jerk who happens to be very invested in the idea of his own goodness, even while he repeatedly uses women for sex without a shred of respect for them. The ending, in which he is dragged away to Hell by the likenesses of all the women he has mistreated, feels phoned-in, even a bit masturbatory. Anyone who is even a little bit online in 2020 can extrapolate the whole thing from the title and “by the author of Cat Person.”
Turn back to that first paragraph if you need a reminder that this book, on the whole, is astonishingly good.
As a point of contrast, “Bad Boy,” another story from the collection, is told from the collective point of view of a couple whose romantically unfortunate friend is crashing on their couch in the aftermath of his third breakup with the same woman. His continued presence annoys them at first, especially given the thin walls of the apartment that probably allow him to hear them having sex in the bedroom. But, in their increasingly urgent attempts to rehabilitate him so that he can finally leave, they come to realize that they can bully their friend into doing whatever they say. From there, it becomes a game of how far they can push the envelope—a game in which the unspoken rule is that they are entitled to victory.
You Know You Want This is a searchlight into the lower depths of human cruelty. Its best offerings—“Bad Boy,” “Sardines,” “Scarred,” and “Biter” being some of the finest examples—are the ones that throw you into the casual terrors of First World life while refusing to provide the moral clarity of “Cat Person” and “The Good Guy.” They’re stories that take a painfully earnest look at what it means to carry the traumas of modern American society in your skin, teeth, and bones, the ways in which we translate them into words and deeds that we can throw back at each other. It’s a book that has so much more to offer than its subtitle, “Cat Person” and Other Stories.
I do think that “Cat Person” is a great story, and its success deserves to be celebrated. But, for all the painfully relatable discomfort it and “The Good Guy” inspire, they are, ultimately, uncomplicated in their subtext, which is why the literary establishment does Kristen Roupenian a disservice in the way it insists on marketing her as The Author of Cat Person.
Roupenian is a writer, living in Michigan
The issue is that it’s not a representative snapshot. Trey Parker and Matt Stone will forever be The Creators of South Park, and everything they make will always be From the Creators of South Park, because, whatever else one might say for or against South Park, it showcases the complete range and limits of their talent. From the Author of Cat Person does not serve this purpose. All it really does is call back to the moment when publishers of literary fiction were finally presented with a temptation great enough to get them to care more about clicks and shares than actual readership.
But the thing about going viral is that it burns out just as quick as it catches on. Pull up the once-ubiquitous Honey Badger video on YouTube and you’ll see not just the video itself, but a depressingly desperate barrage of begs for you to check out Honey Badger merch, Bitcoin mining, and a litany of other attempts to capitalize on the 3-minute video’s once-great circulation. As of this writing, several of the links are already dead. My freshman year roommate in undergrad was one of the guys who set the recut trailer phenomenon in motion with “Brokeback to the Future,” a viral video from 2005 that birthed an entire generation of online content. You’ve never heard of my roommate or his collaborators.
By the time of the book’s publication in January 2019, just over a year after “Cat Person” saw print, the iron had long since ceased to be hot. The story had gone through the complete life cycle of viral media: gotten its moment, been analyzed to death, become tiresome, and then faded from the public consciousness. But, as with the Honey Badger, everyone who got a taste of red meat from its initial success is desperate to believe that there’s still money to be made from whatever mysterious forces blessed it with virality.
You Know You Want This is so much better than the Honey Badger video, and it deserves to be treated as such. The most frustrating part, for me, is the way I still find myself using “Cat Person” as the jumping off point whenever I tell people about this amazing book. It feels easiest to start by providing a point of context that they may be familiar with. But the fact is, I never needed to provide that context for Carmen Maria Machado’s Her Body and Other Parties, a close thematic cousin to this book, which almost everyone I know has now read.
The internet’s cultural memory is short and unreliable. No matter how big of a splash “Cat Person” made upon its release, the ripples do not build into waves over time, and the surface where it hit is looking increasingly flat. My earnest hope for Kristen Roupenian is that she can break free of a story that showcased maybe 20% of her talent. If the literary world would only allow her to show what she’s really capable of, I think the temptation to hang her hat on this early viral success would quickly vanish. Kristen Roupenian has a far more vibrant future than The Author of Cat Person ever will. Open up You Know You Want This and you’ll quickly see what that means.
Byline
M. Shaw is a multi-genre author from Arvada, Colorado. They are a graduate of the Clarion Workshop (2019), as well as one of three organizers of the Denver Mercury Poetry Slam, one of the longest-running slam events in the world. If you've met them in person, they miss you.
Cadwell Turnbull's new novel — the first in a trilogy — imagines the hard, uncertain work of a fantastical justice.