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It is possible that “Cat Person” would not have become a global phenomenon had the story been published before social media, which contributed to its spread and gave readers various platforms on which to discuss it. Critical responses to the 2017 story and to the 2019 collection in which it is included have been generally positive, hailing author Kristen Roupenian’s ability to write taut, suspenseful stories in which protagonists struggle to understand themselves, much less the people around them. Reviewers have commented that “Cat Person” and other stories in the collection are marked by uncertain, threatening moods and include events, such as Robert’s apparent unsettling ability to guess what Margot is thinking, that nudge up against the surreal. Critics also address the frank and sometimes disturbing nature of the description of the sexual encounter between Margot and Robert, a hallmark of her writing style. In “The Good Guy,” for example, Roupenian creates a male protagonist named Ted to explore the effect of fantasies about sex on the reality of sex with actual people. Roupenian has even been tagged by some critics as a voice that represents millennial women, suggesting on the one hand that she has a gift for capturing the cultural moment but on the other that her style of storytelling may be destined to become dated. Regardless, the success of “Cat Person” netted Roupenian a deal estimated at $1.2 million with a major publisher.
As Roupenian recalls in a 2019 article for The New Yorker, “What It Felt Like When ‘Cat Person’ Went Viral,” only a few days passed after the story’s publication before she began to experience unprecedented fame and scrutiny. No short story since Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery,” published with its shocking ending in The New Yorker in 1948, generated such strong responses directed to the magazine. With the help of social media, a global conversation about “Cat Person”—how to read it, whether it was really fiction or “autofiction” or a narrative essay, what it suggested about consent and control—flooded into Roupenian’s public life, in positive, negative, and sometimes threatening ways. To complicate matters, in 2021 a woman named Alexis Nowicki wrote an essay for Slate about how she recognized details in the story too close to her own experience to be coincidental and learned that a mutual friend had talked about her to Roupenian. In an email exchange with the woman, Roupenian regretted that she had used some details from Nowicki’s life without modifying them. The exchange became public and sparked a conversation about the ethics of borrowing details from others’ lives to be used in one’s writing.
