Three Two Seven: Scandals

 There's a new scandal on line around the 2017 Kristen Roupenian short story "Cat Person". Another author, Alexis Nowicki, has published a piece at Slate.com saying that Roupenian drew on the details of Nowicki's own affair with an older man as the basis for "Cat Person". So there's an argument on line about authorial voice, integrity, and who has the right to tell someone's story. That argument is exhausting enough. What makes me anxious, though, is how the person-- called "Charles" in the Slate piece --is being portrayed.

When I was an undergraduate, I ran with a circle of people who planned on writing things-- novels and short stories as well as non-fiction. We took it for granted that one day we'd all be published. I expected that I'd have a career where I'd publish four or five academic history volumes. 

And we all took it as a given that we'd make appearances as at least minor characters in friends' stories and novels. I thought that was a fun idea, and I looked forward to being thirty-five or forty and running into friends and raising a glass and grinning over how we'd appeared in print--- hey, look, I'm the detective's sidekick! I'm the ex-husband! I'm the girl he meets in the airport bar! 

But here in the age of the gender wars, no one gets to feel any delight at being in a story. When Ms. Roupenian used Nowicki's real-life relationship for "Cat Person" she made the affair much darker and unpleasant. The older male in "Cat Person" became the villain of the story. Ms. Nowicki wrote in Slate that the real relationship was nothing at all like what Roupenian depicted. Here in the age of the gender wars, though, no older male can be portrayed in fiction as anything other than creepy and incompetent in bed.

The new "Cat Person" scandal has left me anxious and self-loathing. Any depictions of ex-lovers, and especially older ex-lovers, have to be scathing and savage. The older lover-- Charles --in the real life affair isn't able to defend himself. The Nowicki essay concludes with the discovery that Charles died in 2020. On first reading I thought he'd died of Covid-19, but the essay's insistence that he died "suddenly" leaves me thinking that he committed suicide. Not over the story-- Nowicki never implies that. But nonetheless, Charles isn't able to defend himself in a world where all fiction is taken as auto-fiction. 

So now I have a new anxiety. I still move in circles where people write and blog, and I keep thinking how easy it would be for some ex-lover, a Young Companion from days past, to turn me into the villain of the story. I've been the Older Admirer in relationships for a long time now, and while there are ex-lovers who stay in contact and seem to have fond memories of what we did when we were together, I know that anyone with a laptop or a smartphone can make me into someone distasteful. 

I style myself as roué, and that of course makes me an easy mark as a villain. It would be all-too-easy to portray me as the bad guy. It would be just as easy to portray me as useless in bed. And it's all-too-easy to sit in my flat and assume that somewhere in the city, a faceless, nameless girl is telling an audience that I'm mediocre (at best) as a lover and creepy and disgusting in person. 

"Cat Person" itself made me wince at how the older lover was presented, and the new scandal leaves me convinced that someone somewhere is re-writing the past I believed in. I always thought that most of my past encounters had ended with fond memories on both sides. I can't risk believing that any more.