But some of the irritation felt reasonable after witnessing readers misread what was a complex and skillful story as somehow being About Rape Culture – although most published works are misread, or read differently than the author intended, and so perhaps that didn’t matter. Some short-story writers reacted to the story’s virality like indie rock teenagers offended that their unknown genre became popular with the uncultured (and mostly female) masses, likely fuelled by the fact that they, like me, have kind and encouraging rejection letters from The New Yorker printed above their desks. But when the most frequent adjective about your work is “timely,” is that a compliment? A story about sexual agency, the awkwardness and mismatched fantasies of courting via text message, coming at a time when the #MeToo movement had yet to experience the current wave of backlash, was largely assumed to be the reason for its popularity. A 30-second meme of a moose walking into a hospital is more likely to go viral than a highbrow literary form published in one of the highest-brow locales, but the story’s timely “themes” (ugh) of heterosexual power dynamics and the ways in which women shift around according to men’s emotional cues was very timely. It was published a year ago in December, yet quickly became the most read fiction piece of 2017, and one of the most read pieces in general to appear in the entire magazine in all of that year. Kristen Roupenian was a relatively unknown writer when her short story Cat Person, published in The New Yorker, went viral.
Reviewed from Advanced Reader’s Edition.Title: You Know You Want This – “Cat Person” and Other Stories.