Review: Kristen Roupenian and Dolly Alderton in Conversation

© Penguin

Since its publication in The New Yorker in December, "Cat Person" has divided dinner tables, friendship groups and twitter feeds across the globe. The short story, documenting the awkward, short-lived relationship between student Margot and thirty-four-year-old Robert, has elicited a host of diverse interpretations and responses, and speaks to the complexities of dating in the modern age.

Amid the cacophony of voices weighing in on the story, however, its author has remained largely silent. It was with acute anticipation, therefore, that I joined a large and overwhelmingly female audience in a church in Notting Hill last week to hear Kristen Roupenian speak. The interview, conducted by the ever-engaging Dolly Alderton, proved a thought-provoking discussion, in which Kristen revealed herself to be not only a talented writer, but an articulate and charismatic speaker with a quick sense of humor and some diverse literary aspirations (she has written a horror screenplay, and is hoping to one day try her hand at children's fiction).

Those of us hoping that Kristen might provide some authoritative answers to the questions raised by "Cat Person", however, were to be disappointed. Despite copious prompting from Dolly, she remained largely unwilling to betray her personal stance regarding the various interpretations the story has provoked. Fiction is wonderful, Kristen repeatedly stressed, because it is collaborative: "you write something, you give it to the world, they interpret it". As Ian McEwan's revelation in The Telegraph this week (that his son received a C+ on an essay written on his book with his help) makes clear, once a work enters the public domain, its author cannot control the interpretations it takes on, and nor should they, for it is these unresolved ambiguities that keep literature students quarreling over a text's meaning long after its author is deceased.

As an English graduate herself, Kristen expressed acute awareness of the importance of this collaborative act of interpretation, and acknowledged that the conversation surrounding "Cat Person" has become "so much bigger" than herself or even the story. She also pointed out that the best fiction tends to be that which, rather than attempting to impart a moral lesson, explores its author's own unanswered questions, and leaves gaps for its readers to fill in.

True as all this may be, my friends and I left the event feeling slightly unsatisfied. We found ourselves disappointed by Kristen's reluctance to frame the story within the feminist lens through which we had read it, and to confirm the villainous image of Robert we had conjured in our minds. So many of our pasts are haunted by our own personal Roberts, and it is testament to the power of Kristen's writing that it evokes such meaningful personal reactions.

That said, Kristen did offer the occasional glimpse into her personal viewpoint. She jokingly described the BBC's rewriting of the story from Robert's perspective as "fan fiction" and, while a valid interpretation, not a particularly "interesting" one, while admitting feeling enraged by a response published in the National Review that effectively slut-shamed Margot. She also expressed resistance to interpretations that dismiss Margot as narcissistic, arguing that "to call her narcissistic as if that's the point" shuts down "everything interesting" about the story.

Indeed, Kristen's overwhelming insight into the story, and the social reality it reflects, was to stress its complexity. People, much like fiction, resist straightforward interpretation, and while it may satisfy us to impose categories of good and bad, villain and victim, (cat person and dog person), onto others, reality is rarely so black and white. She discussed at length the idea that people are essentially unknowable, and described the human impulse to try to understand and know others as a self-protective coping mechanism: to know is to control. "Cat Person" vividly demonstrates the limits of these impulses, as Margot and Robert repeatedly attempt, and fail, to interpret and understand one another. Interpretation is made all the more challenging when communication takes place via text message which, as anyone attempting to navigate the world of dating post-iPhone will know, provides whole new possibilities for misconstrued signals, petty power games and, as demonstrated by the story's conclusion, abuse.

I was particularly struck by Kristen's description of modern dating dynamics as a form of play-acting, whereby individuals in a relationship act according to socially-conditioned scripts, and mentally construct idealised versions of one another. In "Cat Person", Margot finds herself mourning "the Robert she'd imagined on the other end of all those messages during break", against which the clumsy, sullen, unattractive Robert of the previous night proves a sobering reality. The tendency towards fanciful construction, coupled with the filtered incarnations of ourselves we present on Tinder profiles and social media sites, creates a weight of expectation to which reality can rarely live up.

On reflection, in giving away very little in terms of conclusive answers to the questions raised by "Cat Person", Kristen revealed a great deal. Her comments provided much food for thought on the complexity of modern dating dynamics, but also prompted me to challenge my own interpretative impulses, both in fiction and in life. While I would have liked Kristen to delve deeper into the sexual politics underlying the story, her responses were compelling and insightful, while keeping open the grey areas that will keep Twitter warriors and English Literature students quarreling for many years to come.

Read the full short story here: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/12/11/cat-person

© The New Yorker