cat person

What do you think Nowicki should have done?

Not aired her grievances publicly. It just strikes me as attention-seeking and I found the whole thing off-putting. Indulgent and insensitive.

I think she has an absolute right to try to reclaim her story, which many people recognized as her story, and clarify what Charles was like with her.

Insensitive to whom?

Sure she has the right, I’m not suggesting otherwise! I just think it is a shitty thing to do! It wasn’t HER story! She didn’t write HER story and get it published in the NYer!

Insensitive to people who cared about Charles, to keep pouring fuel onto a fire that he found distressing!

maybe it will disincline other writers from not changing details like that

"don't do that" would be a fine norm to encourage

She didn’t write HER story and get it published in the NYer!

Agree that publishing a short story about a terrible short story writer with a bunch of identifying details would have been more of a baller move.

No idea about the current process for fact-checking New Yorker fiction, but this suggests that fact-checkers were once required to check for these sorts of things:

An excerpt from Jay McInerney's 1984 novel 'Bright Lights, Big City,' which drew on his experience as a New Yorker fact-checker pic.twitter.com/XbbzDScLQN

— John M. Cunningham (@jmcunning) July 9, 2021

good catch!

Tbf, though, she did write her story and get it published in Slate. xps

Insensitive to people who cared about Charles, to keep pouring fuel onto a fire that he found distressing!

Without hearing from them, I don't think we can safely assume that they would prefer the alternative.

bean person

lmao

wait....was someone eating beans at this movie theater?

nearly every person under age 50 had “died suddenly” or a similar phrase in their obit in the last year if they died of covid

Died "suddenly" or "unexpectedly" with no further information is one of those phrases that, in its attempt to be discreet, can just sow further misunderstanding. It started as a "tasteful" way of indicating suicide and retains that connotation every time it appears.

it’s very context-sensitive and is generally used when the cause of death isn’t relevant to the case at hand (see: the slate article) or if a family wants some level of discretion (opiate overdoses, the similarly vague “death by misadventure,” something shocking (violent car accident), and so on)

it’s basically an indicator you’re trying to say “the cause of death is irrelevant to what I’m writing or I would prefer you not dig into this” which is absolutely what we’re doing in this case

"fan death"

in the uk there is a standard stock phrase for reporting suicide that confused me the first few times i heard it: “the death is not being treated as suspicious.”

the other thing to note is that, in an article calling out overly-specific details that make real people
identifiable, giving “Charles” a specific cause of death would probably make it easy to figure out exactly who he was irl, and give the whole thing an air of hypocrisy

Not hypocritical. The author hopes, I’m sure, that the people who recognized him in the original story will recognize him now. Part of the point of the story, I assumed, was to clear his name among this set.

…among the people who already recognized the character as a distinct person, yes

If the author didn't want people to recognise "Charles", she wouldn't have written the essay in the first place.

I think she knew the cat person was out of the bag, at least for enough people that it caused charles distress about the depitction.

Better to clear up lingering ideas among readers who know him, or knew her, or both, and assumed he was awful to her. That seems to have been the calculus. I think it makes sense.

I agree, but I’m attempting to make the point that by not broadening the details about the man whose life was at least ephemerally mined for the story too far, there’s some level of anonymity that’s preserved

The people who would recognize Charles are not the issue. The people ruminating on every word to dissect how he may have died? They’re the types you obscure things for so that there’s not some weird amateur investigation to dig through, say, motorcycle accidents in the regional papers to find someone in the right age range. People who think “the truth” is the real story here and not just a grey moral rumination on authorial ethics, and what it feels like to have parts of your story recognizably repurposed

There’s not an inherent “please stop digging” in the Slate article but I do feel there’s a “please move on, nothing to see here”

the other thing to note is that, in an article calling out overly-specific details that make real people
identifiable, giving “Charles” a specific cause of death would probably make it easy to figure out exactly who he was irl, and give the whole thing an air of hypocrisy

― mh, Sunday, July 11, 2021 7:55 PM (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

come on man lol

I thought his death was the crux of the article, that if he was alive it wouldn't have been written.

xp who knows man, maybe I’m projecting

I just think the tendency to become internet detective is very alluring to people for a reason and, barring a specific cause, it’s not a good tendency to start digging into the lives of others

maybe cause of death, etc. just don’t matter, maybe they’re left out for a reason, who really cares. maybe we shouldn’t care!

If she didn't mean to imply that the original story caused Charles to end his life, she should have said so.

I think so too honestly. It is obviously a possibility readers would consider. She should have foreseen that. I would bet she did foresee that...

In any case I don’t think Charles’ death is all that relevant to the issue. Even if he were alive and well, the story caused him unease, and it continues to cause the author of the essay unease as well. That is why she tried to clear the record.

And yet if you seriously don't want random people to mull over Robert/Charles's life and why he died, and him being inevitably outed in a twitter thread at some point, a then friend of his writing something about him on Medium etc etc etc, probably best not to write the essay in the first place.

Yeah I feel like the essay is more about her being butthurt that her life was mined for a story, than about her defending Charles’ character.

Why “butthurt” rather than hurt and violated? Roupenian tracked down details of her life from social media to include them in the story. Then she depicted her and her relationship in a way that wasn’t accurate.

If Roupenian changed the details so it was about an older man and a younger woman—and not clearly based on these two specific people—there would be no essay and people would have been spared some pain.

And yet if you seriously don't want random people to mull over Robert/Charles's life and why he died

But “mulling over” his life wasn’t the issue, it was that people thought he was a misogynist and a creep

Does she *own* the details of her life? Do any of us?

She posted details of her life on social media. And yeah Roupenian could have been more sensitive about changing things up. But "hurt and violated"?

she used extremely identifying information including the person's tiny hometown, wrote a story with a ton of embellished stuff that cast the people involved in a very unflattering light, and submitted it to the new yorker! bad!

or in roupenian's own words:

When I was living in Ann Arbor, I had an encounter with a man. I later learned, from social media, that this man previously had a much younger girlfriend. I also learned a handful of facts about her: that she worked in a movie theater, that she was from a town adjacent to Ann Arbor, and that she was an undergrad at the same school I attended as a grad student. Using those facts as a jumping-off point, I then wrote a story that was primarily a work of the imagination, but which also drew on my own personal experiences, both past and present. In retrospect, I was wrong not to go back and remove those biographical details, especially the name of the town. Not doing so was careless.

But "hurt and violated"?

this is how I would feel in her shoes I think, yes

She posted details of her life on social media.

This is irrelevant. Most people do this. Roupenian took these external details — a lot of them, to the letter — and invented unflattering private details including an awful sexual experience. It’s so violating.

And it cast this dude Charles as the scum of the Earth. A symbol of toxic masculinity.

Which, at least from the essay writer’s perspective, was unfair. Roupenian knew the guy too and maybe she felt it was a fair depiction based on her experience. There is no way to know. And it’s also irrelevant because it wasn’t just Charles—she dragged a third party into it (the essay writer).

invented unflattering private details

Or, in other words, wrote some fiction.

Why not change the name of the hometown and make her work at a different movie theater. Then it would be a fictional character.

As it is, it’s creepy.

It’s fine to base a character on someone just don’t make it obvious to everyone who knows them

did anyone ever figure out what the cat's name was