In case you're r-slurred, context is: in 2016ish, the New Yorker published "Cat Person", a short story, and it went viral which is weird for literary fiction. It was about a college student who meets a slightly older guy, texts him a bunch, and then when they actually meet up and bang he's kind of disappointing and awkward. That's about it. I cannot emphasise how viral this story went, if you somehow missed it, and how abnormal it is for short stories to be so famous.
In 2021, some New Yorker literary person writes the linked article in Slate, in which she claims the author of Cat Person somehow ripped off her literal life. She describes how, when she was younger, she dated a much older guy exactly like the character in the short story (although she goes to great pains to establish that he wasn't as pathetic as the character was), and when the story came out she was sure the author -- whom she does not know but has some vague second-hand connection to via a college course -- has ripped off her life. Some of the details are very specific but the story is changed enough that there's reasonable doubt, and she lets it go for a few years until the dude she used to date kills himself.
She makes a big show of the mystery of how the writer knew this story about her to rip it off like this, when it turns out the writer simply knew the guy and had been in contact with him.
The Slate writer manages to finagle an apology out of the author, but she only half-hearted and passively apologises. Twitter drama and controversy erupts. It's in the linked article, I'm not going to summarise, and you can google for the twitter seethe.
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There was a film deal right, is that completely derailed yet or are we on track for a third round of discourse when it releases?
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The movie is coming. Apparently it takes the story completely off the rails and invents a wacko thriller plot. Because you can't actually stretch "foid has a bad date and puts out" into two hours
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R-slurred way to talk about the original short story, which probably didn't deserve virality but was interesting enough. Rslurs on this site apparently have never read anything other Brandon Sanderson and can't understand that lit fic is generally fairly low concept
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The reception was insane. It was treated as this great unveiling of The Truth About Dating In Current Year. You get the woman's every thought and it's all about her ambivalence, but because the guy can't read her mind he just thinks he's met a woman who seems into him who secretly kind of hates him.
The big revelation at the end of that when she stops seeing him, he texts her calling her a b-word. Oh look, secretly he was an evil misogynist all along! She barely escaped with her life! As a slice of life story on its own, fine, it tells its story and tells it decently. But it was treated as a 'look at what women have to put up with, evil Nice Guys are everywhere' tale of great truth and insight.
So finding out she based it on a real guy she dated who had since killed himself, and that her other writing is mediocre, encourages criticism of the actions of the main character and how only her inner life exists. So it becomes 'women expect you to be mindreaders and hate you if you can't.'
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Literally every source I can find has the author saying she heard the story about this 17 year dating a 30 year old and thought it'd be interesting enough for some lit fic short story, not that she's trying to depict a universal experience (in fact she's trying to do the opposite). I don't think the ending makes any profound point but I've met plenty of ‘nice' men that'd call a woman a b-word once they're sure they can't frick her anymore
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The reception was what turned it into a universal experience, but I'm leery of accepting her explanation once you find out the man is a real person she also knew/dated.
And I don't deny plenty of men will do that, just that again, it comes off very differently with that context.
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I'm equally proud of not reading Brandon Sanderson and not reading the New Yorker.
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Litpseuds
haven't gatekept 
hard enough. 
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ah, kino
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