Helen, I am seeing that awful close-up picture of mouths kissing on my timeline again and hesitate to ask, but why?

The short story Cat Person is in the news once more, because a woman named Alexis Nowicki has written an essay for Slate in which she explains that she is the real-life cat person the Cat Person story is based on, and that her ex-boyfriend is the other cat person in the story, and that he was actually a lovely person in real life and really did have cats and wasn’t pretending, unlike in the story.

Eh?

Back in December 2017, a short story in the New Yorker called Cat Person went absolutely nuts online, becoming maybe the first piece of short fiction ever to do so. In it, the previously unknown writer, Kristen Roupenian, tells the story of a young woman’s relationship with an older man.

They exchange jokes about cats. She goes to his house and he says: “Just so you know, I have cats.” They have sex. Later, she suspects he might not really have cats at all. Eventually she ghosts him and he sends her a text that says “Whore”.

And IRL?

In the Slate story, Nowicki says that when the piece came out, she was watching Call Me By Your Name “for the second time, alone”. She leaves the theatre and sees that her phone is blowing up. A short story has come out in the New Yorker and her friends are texting to ask whether she wrote it under a pseudonym, or whether it is about her, or whether the man – who Nowicki calls “Charles” in the essay – wrote it himself.

Was she also grossed out by the picture?

She was. In those exact words. And there are a lot of details in the story that match her real life at the time she dated Charles.

The protagonist is from the same small town, goes to the same college, works at the same art house theatre. The man in the story is, like Charles in real life, a man in his 30s who is “tall, slightly overweight, with a tattoo on his shoulder” and wears a “rabbit fur hat and a vintage coat”. The decor and contents of his house are the same.

But in Nowicki’s experience, the sex was different, and he didn’t send her mean texts. In fact, she emphasises “how respectful and caring he could be” before he died suddenly in November last year.

There is more, but you might want to read the essay for yourself (it is sad and thoughtful).

But was it definitely her? And how?!

Eventually Nowicki contacted Roupenian to find out. Roupenian told her that after having “an encounter” with the real-life Charles, she noticed he had once dated a much younger woman – Nowicki – and mined Nowicki’s social media for the details she used in the story.

“I later learned, from social media, that this man previously had a much younger girlfriend,” Roupenian writes in an email. “I also learned a handful of facts about her.”

Anything else I should know before I delete every social media account I own?

Two things. First, people are debating the ethics of authors using the details of strangers’ lives in their fiction.

Second, they are asking a question literary scholars have been discussing for centuries.

Which is?

Are all cats female and all dogs male?