At the end of 2017, the short story ‘Cat Person’ was published in The New Yorker and swiftly shared and shared again online, gaining over 4.5 million views and inspiring myriad opinion pieces. Margot, twenty years old, has an unpleasant sexual encounter with Robert, who is in his mid-thirties. Detailing the build up to and aftermath of one awful date, the story deals with issues of consent, ambiguity, and communication; it is in the third person but is filtered through Margot's perspective, quite sparely written yet dotted throughout with occasional sharp, horrible details. It provoked sharp responses in turn. Some readers and commenters saw the piece as particularly of its time, a story for #MeToo, its perfect timing leading to its frequently referred to status as ‘perhaps the most talked about short story ever’. Others were more interested in its previously unknown author, Kristen Roupenian, and in how ‘Cat Person’ related to Roupenian and her life. Her short piece of fiction was widely misunderstood as memoir, as a non-fiction personal essay; this misreading and the need to correct it became part of the narrative around ‘Cat Person’. Even when understood as fiction, the story was presumed to be autobiographical, and an intense fascination with Roupenian's private life even led to her relationship with a woman making front page news.

‘Cat Person’, incidentally, revolves around acts of interpretation. Details are considered, interpreted, reinterpreted, Margot worries over how she is being judged, how she is being read. She imagines her date's responses, his reception of her. Towards the close of the story she tries to write a text message to Robert to say she no longer wishes to see him, and struggles to compose anything that runs no risk of being misread – that has no room for misunderstanding, no space for Robert to squeeze his own meaning into. As texts from him appear on her phone, she imagines Robert ‘carefully crafting’ his messages, lying on his mattress for a bed. Women writers have to deal with presumptions of autobiography more often than their male counterparts – for this we can thank an undercurrent of misogyny in twenty-first-century literary and online culture. But any author can face such assumptions, and a concurrently keen interest in their personal lives. This is due to a broader, ongoing, modern attitude towards the link between an author's life and work that has its roots in romantic literary criticism.