Remember Cat Person?

The short story?

I used to think that I would publish a poem in a literary magazine that would catch fire and break me into the next level of poet¹. I was one Saran Wrap layer away from being read by all the millions of poetry fans in the world. If only I could get in OnTheBus! Soon, I would be sitting next to Bukowski at the racetrack² and co-headlining spoken word tours with Henry Rollins.

This is my friend Christine’s cat. It replaces the generic kitten picture I used before that I took from the Internet.

This idea was thoroughly wrong. I was the type of obsessive reader who did read every page of a literary mag or anthology, but most people only read the writers they already knew; also, my idea of how many copies of those mags were out there was way off—I thought the 1000 copy lit mags were selling hundreds of thousands. The famous writers that were in such publications weren’t famous because they got in the anthology, they had a whole career before being selected. Getting in literary mags is good for your career if you have a certain path, but one publication isn’t going to break you.

With one exception.

2017

The December 11, 2017 issue of The New Yorker contained “Cat Person,”³ a short story by a previously unpublished writer named Kristen Roupenian. The New Yorker does accept unsolicited submissions, but it’s the spiritual equivalent of throwing a tennis ball off the top of a skyscraper in the middle of the night. I doubt I’ll ever get inside its workings to know how they choose a story exactly, but every other author I’ve seen in its pages had at least a well-received novel in their wake but often are the contemporary lit-standards like TC Boyle or Joyce Carol Oates, and I get the idea they’re not just sending any ol’ piece that they banged out. I would like to think that writers everywhere told each other, hey, we can do this! They really do look at everything! But what made this story crack was that seemingly everyone with a social media account read it—it went viral AF.

EDIT: in this YouTube clip from last year with 58 views at the time of this edit, Kristen says that she got an agent to represent her stories (very rare!) and the agent sent them out. The New Yorker did not pull it off the haystack of regular-people submissions. It at least came from a source with some connections.

It went viral in the fun way—where everyone supports something, like a goofy dance or an interview clip or a food trend, as opposed to something horrible a billionaire does. But this wasn’t The Harlem Shake or The Ice Bucket Challenge, it wasn’t a joke out of context from a comedy special on Netflix, it was a piece of literature! People were reading! I was thrilled that everyone’s Facebook posts were their two cents about the story, sometimes relating it to something in their own lives—which is what art is supposed to make us talk about.

Immediately, there was a fight for Roupenian by every literary publisher in the marketplace. “Cat Person” plus another 200 pages of anything Roupenian wrote would sell. The hardest part of publishing, the marketing and making people aware of the work, had already been done au naturel. I was never able to figure out if she had been represented before, and it’s likely she was to get her story in The New Yorker, but if she hadn’t been, she had her pick of the litter post-publication. Just nine days later, AP reported that she landed a $1M two book deal. The catch: the collection wouldn’t come out until 2019.

So we, the reported 4 million-plus link-clickers from The New Yorker website had to wait. And we discussed this story with a self-righteous intellectual fury not seen since the good old days of LiveJournal⁴ and the bulletin-board internet culture that came even before that⁵. I made a post asking if this was the first case of an author landing a book deal because a short story went viral, and that post went viral⁶, and not in the fun way—I was a Giant Misogynist Monster for saying “there’s no way that a woman could have the talent to get a book deal based on merit,” which is not at all what I asked, but that’s how the algorithmic masses took it.

I’ve been a writer since the late ‘80s and got my first publishing job in 1992, and at that point, had eight books published. Based on merit, you’re getting a four-figure advance and right of refusal on your next manuscript. That’s what literary publishing was and will be for years to come. The money will probably get smaller, is my guess—in time, books will sell just for royalty percentages with no advances. But try telling this to the people who read one short story a year or less—many of them think all writers with a book are making a living off that book, or at the very least can support themselves for the time it takes to write the book with what the book makes. I deleted the post.

But who was she? Where did she come from? Her IG showed a thesis statement on killer clowns submitted to the University of Maine for a MS degree in Criminology. And a few years later, an MFA thesis called Look After Me.

2018

Deadspin announced that HBO had the story collection in development. The amount the IP holder gets for this ranges from Nothing to Retire Now. But when the deal is made before the book comes out, you know they had to pay for it. But one thing we all noted was that “Cat Person” was not part of the deal. What we can all deduce from this is that the rights to that had already been sold. A movie and a series from the same yet-to-be-released book! Another unicorn sighting.

A24 bought a horror script of hers called Bodies Bodies Bodies. Wait, so she can write screenplays, too? Jesus! Is there anything she can’t do? It came out in 2022. I liked it. Watch it in the dark.

2019

You Know You Want This, the collection of short stories came out, and with the accompanying press, we finally learned about who Kristen was and part of how she got where she was.

Roupenian is a fucking Harvard PhD in English. I considered getting my PhD in English, and that is not for me. Prepare to lose yourself to the world for five years at the least. You have to know at least one additional language relevant to your research, well enough that you can read great works written in that language. And the dissertation is a notorious mental-wellness killer. It’s like being a Navy Seal for book nerds. As much as I love reading, I’ll never have the thorough understanding of Milton, Chaucer, and Shakespeare that is necessary. So the point is, much respect for this alone. Writing “Cat Person” is cool, but this is another level of smarts. Of course, if I got that PhD, I would never go get my MFA after that, which she did⁷.

And then, the fizzle—the sound of no one caring that 99% of published poets and writers will feel at some point. Kristen Roupenian—she’s just like us!

It was weird. It had only been a little over a year, since the December 2017 publication of the magazine and the January 2019 release of the book. But in the social media age, it’s the same amount of time between when you think your prom tux looks cool and when you hide it between pages of the DSM-IV that you use to anchor your bookshelf.

I got laid off in February 2019, then totaled my car soon after, so new books would wait for adequate brainspace. I completely forgot about the book coming out. I think I was writing a chapbook of poems based on The Wire and I was also training for a big kettlebell competition coming up in Las Vegas. And I had just started dating the person with whom I’m living with now. Looking back on it, I had a lot going on.

A quote swiped from her IG upon release, regarding the haters and negative reviews of the book: “…the contempt that had been aimed my way had started to seep into my own assessment of myself. But the truth is, I wrote the book I wanted to write. It exists within a tradition of horror fiction by women that I love and am also deeply knowledgeable about, and any assessment of it that doesn't take that into account is incomplete.”

2021

A Slate article popped up written by Alexis Nowicki who lived the life of the character in the story. There are often weird parallels in any story you make up to someone else’s reality, but this got confirmed that, at the very least, Roupenian had gotten details from Nowicki’s social media posts and knew her ex.

Now, this isn’t plagiarism nor is it stealing or illegal. Writers take from everything they’ve lived, seen, and experienced, whether it’s first-hand or third. We scrape our existences to build data sets for our own creative process.

I’ve read literal conversations I had with writers in real life that appeared later in their books. I’ve told standup comics personal anecdotes that they have taken to the stage as their own first-person experiences. I’ve been accused of ripping off other poets who “covered” my poems in poetry slams. And, as a character, I’ve seen myself in my friends’ books and am the subject of two punk songs⁸.

Sometimes it’s fun, and sometimes it sucks. But at least, as a writer, I have a chance to tell my side of the story.

In December, Roupenian made her last IG post and slipped away from social media.

2023

Cat Person finally came out…in four theaters. It grossed $55K domestically on a $12M budget⁹. I was waiting for this, but didn’t notice. I didn’t see it was out until it went to Hoopla. Not even Kanopy! Straight to Hoopla. I think it did pop up on some other mainstreamers later but going immediately to the library streamers is not a good sign.

The filmmakers added a thriller angle to the slice-of-life storyline, which didn’t help a damn thing. I’m not going into the deep water on this one; just imagine any book you liked that was changed drastically in the movie version. Same ol’ shit.

By then, the title had lost all recognition. I could rattle the memory of some people by saying, “you know, that New Yorker story that went viral,” but for the most part, the story had left the public consciousness.

2025

We’re in our eighth year since the publication. We had an entire presidential administration and a global pandemic in that time. I bought eggs for 99 cents a dozen back then. A lot has happened. So where’s the novel?

Every once in a while I look up Roupenian to see if the novel is coming. It’s not. I’ll find something like Milkwishes, but it’s just the German language version of the story collection.

And speaking of the story collection, it’s now called “Cat Person” and Other Stories. I don’t know the sales numbers, but when a book is renamed, and it rarely happens, it’s not because the book did well.

However, Kristen has so many degrees and seems so hypercapable, I don’t doubt she’s living off the money from her advance, screenplay, and development deals.

If you have a good Kristen Roupenian story, or a reputable link to what she’s up to, let me know and I’ll edit the comments in.

Thanks for reading!

1. This does not exist.

2. Bukowski did not hang out with other people in general. I knew this. But I thought when he finds out what “the kid” is writing, he’d change his mind.

3. Sorry about the paywall. Maybe you have it, maybe you don’t. I’m out of free articles.

4. Your LiveJournal is probably still up there. That shit still lives.

5. There was some Chuck Palahniuk message board in the ‘90s where we got deep on all kinds of literature, since he only had three books out, and we had read them. It was a fun place to try to one-up each other on the other authors.

6. I got “ratio’d” hard. Do kids still say that?

7. this article from Barnard’s school site talks about her background.

8. If Bucky’s Right. RIP Jesse Morris.

9. Box Office Mojo