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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The Motte melted down about this recently:
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It's fine for a story to be one-sided, but when it's recognisably about a real person it invites closer scrutiny. The guy comes off very poorly in the story in a 'banality of evil' kind of way, so knowing him and seeing him be treated as a monster can't be a good feeling, especially as he's killed himself in the intervening years.
The story makes him seem so terrible based mostly because the woman objects to some of his behaviour, is ambivalent about sleeping with him, but never communicates her feelings or takes accountability for her choices. So knowing it's not just about an ex, but a specific ex, emphasises the skilful hatchet job she's done on a fling from years ago. And a story that was treated as a universal experience of the danger of dating as a woman, becomes a solipsistic examination of why the author didn't deserve to be called a b-word, David, I never even liked you that much.
Context makes a woman's bias apparent.
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