In September of 1989, an episode of sitcom Family Matters featured Rachel, a young author, selling a manuscript based on her brother’s family. Her brother’s family recognize themselves in the story, and are outraged by the negative depictions. They perceive Rachel as highlighting their worst characteristics for a hasty sale. Rachel spends the episode explaining how fictioneering works, and gradually making peace with her brother’s extended family.
For context, this was Season 1, Episode 3, so something the writers’ room presented early. Presumably they wanted to remind their own families that, though they used personal experiences as story foundations, they didn’t mean anything literally. Something relevant must’ve happened in Hollywood around that time, because six months later, a Golden Girls episode featured Blanche spitting outrage when she saw herself depicted in her sister’s Jacqueline Susann-like sexploitation novel.
Kristen Roupenian’s “Cat Person,” a 2017 New Yorker story about a dysfunctional May-late August relationship, regained currency this week. Alexis Nowicki, a Brooklyn book publicist, published a Slate article claiming the story appropriated significant portions of her life, including her college relationship with a much older graduate student. This despite, Nowicki admits, never meeting Roupenian. The Twitter commentariat started circling like buzzards, as it does.
The occasional bomb-thrower claims Roupenian transgressed somehow by using somebody else’s story. I even saw the word “plagiarism” misapplied. But these were outliers, the people Mick Hume calls “full-time professional offense takers.” The largest fraction of audience responses involved wisecracks about the appropriateness of Nowicki’s response. Since when, these respondents (many of them writers) asked, is it wrong or inflammatory for writers to fictionalize other people’s stories?
My favorite responses to Nowicki’s article ask: what responsibility do writers have in fictionalizing stories that aren’t theirs? We all, as writers and readers alike, understand humanity through other people, and therefore process difficult or morally ambiguous situations through stories. When our personal experiences don’t provide the necessary narratives, we turn to others’ stories. We all do it, but what moral onus does it place upon us?
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| Ernest Hemingway |
In high school, my teachers frequently treated fiction and poetry like crossword puzzle clues. American Literature classes particularly repeated this. Authors, especially Hemingway and Fitzgerald, were treated like cypers from the past. Like Ralphie in A Christmas Story, we needed to apply our decoder rings to unlock the concealed meaning, which was always one-to-one. Literature wasn’t presented as art to mull over and live with, but a message to understand.
Perhaps you’ve heard that wheezy advice frequently given to young authors: “write what you know.” We assume that authors only create work by fictionalizing their personal experience, then we reverse-engineer such experience onto others’ work. I’ve always distrusted this advice, since it implies you can’t understand anybody’s experiences except your own. After all, Stephen Crane didn’t need to fight in the Civil War to write The Red Badge of Courage.
According to Nowicki, Roupenian admitted writing her story in an MFA workshop, and sending it into the New Yorker slush pile, where literary fiction usually goes to die. For whatever reason, it struck a chord, and the editors bought it, propelling a young graduate student into the ranks of luminaries like David Sedaris and Jamaica Kincaid. Then, because Roupenian addressed emotionally loaded topics, her story quickly became a lightning rod for cheap online outrage.
I’m reminded of 2016, when online critics, including friends of mine, willfully misread a Calvin Trillin ditty. Or January, 2020, when firebrands responded to an Isabel Fall story, without apparently reading past the title, with such ferocity that the author needed psychiatric treatment. In each case, audiences “decoded” literal, singular messages from these works, like reading Hemingway in 11th-grade AmLit, giving the works one, singular, invariable meaning.
Worse, like Rachel’s family or Blanche, these audiences seek the most negative, adversarial meaning. They project their insecurities onto, not the work, but the author, attributing malicious intent rather than the desire to write compelling fiction. The Family Matters and Golden Girls writers’ rooms shared this premise, presumably because their own families thought they’d recycled family drama. Which perhaps they did, but not malevolently.
Alexis Nowicki, like those TV families, wanted everyone to know her story wasn’t as toxic as that depicted in fiction. She recalls her relationship with “Charles” fondly, but distantly, like many college relationships. But like those families, Nowicki’s self-defense imputes authorial intent onto Kristen Roupenian. She sees Roupenian’s writing not as art, but as journalism. In doing so, she diminishes art’s psychological impact, and makes other minds less real.
lmao no one better try to come for me when i write this toxic ass relationship in this book. y'all better use critical thinking skills and realize that i'm doing it on purpose for catharsis and call it a day
— joelle wellington (@joelle_welling) July 9, 2021
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