THE PHOTOGRAPHER ON CAPTURING A KISS

It’s unusual for a short story to generate the kind of online commotion created by Kristen Roupenian’s “Cat Person,” which appeared in the magazine last week. Nearly every woman I spoke with about it found Roupenian’s detailed articulation of a strange and terrible sexual bargaining—is it easier (or safer) for me to just let this happen, rather than to try and stop it?—queasily familiar. “There is no doubt fiction makes a better job of the truth,” Doris Lessing wrote, in 1949, in the first volume of her autobiography. For many readers, “Cat Person” felt not just true but revelatory. It was a kind of unburdening—a suggestion that, perhaps, the uneasy internal monologues we deliver to ourselves during our most vulnerable and confusing moments are, in fact, shared.

13 December 2017