cat person

are there any stories where people are in emotionally supportive relationships based on mutual affection? maybe something else bad could happen to them after, but to start.

No

hm, i guess that makes sense based on her whole style. but ime most relationships are like that. not perfect, sometimes they don't work out, but people tend to care about their partners, even if they also resent them in some ways. what was alienating about "the good guy" is he only saw the women in his life through the prism of himself--how they reflected back on how he saw himself (powerful, a "good guy," whatever).

xxp Mordy - the setup for the punchline would take too long to explain & its groanworthiness might be lost. it has to be read to be believed. I'll try later

xp well yeah, she's not the ambassador of dating and relationships, she has a niche and mines it.

for sure, and i'm not saying she "should" do her thing differently. the thing that is surprising, reading about this, is that she isn't really going for realism anyway, even though cat person suggested that was her bag. these are horror stories.

she should have leaned into the punchline gimmick and ended every single story with "Whore."

whore or stories

But my favorite is the final story in the collection, “Biter,” which is about a girl who discovers a love of biting in preschool. Later, as an adult, she must find a socially acceptable way to get away with assuaging her craving for flesh; when she accidentally stumbles on a predatory man, she discovers that she can bite with impunity. It made me say “ew” out loud while I was reading it, but I didn’t feel like that “ew” moment was used (as with the white worm) for no reason. This story’s ending, which I won’t spoil, lands. Its moral seems to be: Take advantage of the flaws in the system, as long as they’re not going anywhere. Good for the biter, I guess.

Is the punchline something about biting off more than she could chew?

how hard does she want to bite? a little biting is ok

being single and dating is at once the most debased and pathetic state one can find themselves in, and the most fascinating, because you can tell your friends tittilating and gruesome tales of bad dates. i look forward to finding a long-term partner, yetcst the same time know that once i do, ill be forever more boring to everyone i meet

Oh man, I loved to bite as a child, teen, uh early dater. I really had to hone that in. Maybe I should read that story.

i feel like biting is extremely normal. if you're biting enough to break skin that's pretty different though.

so the woman makes up a game called "Opportunity" to figure out a way to clandestinely bite her new boss: where he's most often alone, where she could satisfy her urge to bite him and plausibly get away with it. the boss is portrayed as a total heartthrob, innocent and hot, all the women in the office love him. the woman is really playing Opportunity a lot and trying to figure out how to bite him. one day, he goes in for an unsolicited kiss and grabs her butt. she bites a huge chunk of his cheek off, extremely satisfied. the final two lines:

Because, as Ellie quickly learned, there was one in every office: the man everyone whispered about. All she had to do was listen, and wait, and give him an Opportunity, and soon enough, he would find her.

COME ON

Yeah, I was a bad biter. I think it was aggro/frustration issues already seeing/feeling it in my mind/jaw. I probably would relate to this story.

wait, how was it an unsolicited kiss if she was playing "opportunity"?

also she would definitely not get away with that.

"Biter" is written from the POV of a female "predator," someone who learned early in life that her sexual desire to bite people isn't socially acceptable, and suddenly finds herself employed by a man so attractive her urge to bite him overcomes logic and self-control. she's enamored with him and we see him as a flawless, inevitable victim. when he makes a move far more aggressive than she anticipated, she's able to plausibly retaliate and not only not get in trouble, but gain the respect of her coworkers, who actually have been menaced by this "elf" all along. Fuck

the combo of horror/magical realism + sexual/romantic realism does not work at all imo - these stories are a drag

Weird

so on a “short stories with similar shtick that’s somewhat shocking/out there” how does this writer compare to like, Chuck Palahniuk

xpost That one seems to work. But I haven't read it. I literally feel I live most of my life waiting for a rational and defendable reason to beat the shit out of someone and bite them Rick Grimes-style. Because I am tired of passively getting out of the way of terrible men.

xp besides Stephen King that's the other author I thought of. I mean, whatever collection "Guts" is in is lightyears ahead of this.

xpost That one seems to work. But I haven't read it.

it's not a bad conceit, but the execution is just atrocious

Well at least the cover of the book is nice.

How does the magical realism/sex/horror element of her writing compare with someone like Alissa Nutting?

I’d say that Nutting compares to Rou(penian)

Well at least the cover of the book is nice.

disagree on this too, looks like it was thrown together in five minutes with stock font & design imo

So much of the book screams rush job, which it obviously is. I know you gotta make hay while the sun shines but this really suffered for it.

Oh, I like the deepening angular shades of millennial pink forming a nipple, vulva, asshole. I expect it looks good from distance but I haven't seen it in person.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/jan/26/cat-person-author-kristen-roupenian-dating-ego-power-control

Guys, there are other, better books you can read.

like Anna Kavan

Everything people say about this stuff I think is present in Mary Gaitskill's Bad Behaviour and that's about 30 years old.

It’s fiction for ppl who miss Girls

god, did they stop making Girls?

god, did they stop making Girls?

children of men (2006)

It’s fiction for ppl who miss Girls

it's nothing like girls

This is a pretty good rev of it: https://www.lrb.co.uk/v41/n03/lauren-oyler/pressure-to-please

that review has quite detailed descriptions of the plots of a few of the stories just fyi

that writer, lauren oyler, is good. i've enjoyed her pieces for the baffler.

something about the existence of this cat person book is really depressing to me. i haven't even read it--just the two stories and the synopses of the other ones.

there is something super foucaultian about those two stories. the surface level of social interaction and romance--the moments when people are civil to each other--are in these stories just a facade, and right underneath is just power games/struggles. this is actually not far off from how MRAs see things. i can't live in a mental world where that's what life is though. i don't think it's true, even if there are grains of truth.

it's true for some people. sociopaths mostly.

right. i think a lot of critical theory can lend one to conclusions that people are sociopaths though, if you take it one-dimensionally. like, a lot of that stuff reveals power relations, exploitation, etc, which are fundamental to how society is constructed--it's all true. but also there is like, more to life than just that.

maybe the "horror" element of these stories is that they dramatizing the lurking fear that maybe there isn't more to life than what critical theory describes.

oyler is straight up terrible

sorry lol i'm gonna have to qualify that aren't i, tbh i became aware of her through her terrible lady bird review and her "dan savage: not so problematic after all!!!" piece for the outline was high bullshit

if she's gotten good since then i'm probably not going to find out by reading a cat person review

I’m not familiar with those pieces. The things I read were about social media—I forget what she said but I remember I related to it.

seems fine that you like her! not sure why i have to register my dislike of someone's writing every time i see their name, working on it

i haven't read these stories except for the thread's titular one, but if they're based around dating and interpersonal relationships i have heard so-called "horror stories" from both men and women over the years, but generally speaking only women have told me stories from that realm that veer towards actual horror involving power games and false civility.

loneliness of the middle distance dater

From cat person, the good guy, and the synopses of “the biter” and especially the thigh bone story, it seems her theme is narcissism. The characters relate to other people based on what they want from them—there is no real “connection” happening. Which, i mean, certainly that reflects a reality of human psychology.

But she also ties this to common cultural tropes, like about “nice guys” with the good guy or ambiguous consent like with the cat person, so the collection as a whole sort of appears to be addressing the zeitgeist and saying something about the way we now. Or if not that, then responding to the way people talk about the way we live now. And considered in that light this is a grim book indeed. Which isn’t in itself damning—I don’t need hope and redemption in all my books—but raw misanthropy, i’m not sure. That isn’t appealing.