Not Really a Cat Person - ELLE May 2019

Kristen Roupenian is more than the short story that made her famous

You’d be forgiven for thinking the tale written by Kristen Roupenian about Margot and Robert’s excruciatingly bad date, in the viral The New Yorker story called Cat Person, was a memoir. So painfully and unfortunately familiar, one person even lamented The New Yorker published “diary entries”. But in reality, Roupenian, who was lauded for the kind of millennial realism that Lena Dunham’s Girls captured, is, in fact, a horror-genre author. In her first book of dark and twisted short stories, You Know You Want This, Cat Person is sandwiched between 11 far more extreme and twisted fantasy tales. She talks to ELLE about what it’s like to go viral and what she plans to do next.

ON SUBVERTING PEOPLE’S EXPECTATIONS

“When Cat Person went viral, one of the things that was very disorienting about the whole experience was that I knew people were going to expect me to be a very different writer to the one I was. I was curious to see how responses to Cat Person would change in the context of the collection. I’ve been remarkably surprised by how many people are willing to take the leap with me, and especially young women readers who responded to the book, which is truly and intensely an uncomfortable experience. Readers of Cat Person were ready to be made uncomfortable in these different ways.”

ON SURPRISING READERS

“I love it when books do that to me. I love when I think I’m on one ride and then I’m like, ‘Oh God, how did we end up here, where am I?’ I think there can be a really great feeling of disorientation when a book goes somewhere you weren’t expecting. One story that has a special place in my heart is Look At Your Game, Girl – the Charles Manson story. None of the protagonists are me, but I feel like I captured something that was true for me about feeling 11. The themes I’d love for people to see in the book are most visible in that story: her vulnerability, her desire for something that also scares her and how she’s trying to orient herself in the world.”

ON FOLLOWING UP CAT PERSON

“I had written most of the stories before The New Yorker published Cat Person. I can’t even imagine what it would have been like trying to write a book from scratch in the wake of all of that. However, I was working on my novella The Good Guy when Cat Person was published, and I wrote Death Wish afterwards. So it was also nice to know I wasn’t completely frozen in the spotlight because I had a strong sense of where I was going before it all happened. My editors were ready to let the book be the weird dark thing that it needed to be and not try to shape it into something else based on the expectations Cat Person created.”

ON PEOPLE CONFLATING THE STORY WITH HER OWN LIFE

“It certainly was hard; it was overwhelming. I feel very glad that I had my wits about me enough to recognise that I couldn’t engage; I couldn’t try to jump into the conversation and direct it and try to make people see what I wanted them to see. That’s the isolating thing about it – for everyone else it’s a day or two where everybody’s thinking about Cat Person, and then, for the person it happens to, who is on the other side, it’s the definitive moment of your life. There is a really weird and strange feeling of disconnect between how you’re feeling something versus how everyone else is.”

ON WHAT’S NEXT

“I have a two-book contract for a novel to come after this, which I’ve still got to write. I’m learning and figuring out how to now be a writer with an audience; it’s a very different world to when I wrote the majority of these stories. I also sold an original screenplay [a scary story called Bodies, Bodies, Bodies] to A24 and we’re talking to directors. [Screenwriting] is something that’s almost entirely new to me, and it’s very grounding to be like, ‘I’m an amateur, I need someone to help me learn the basics’. [Writers] Carly Wray and Lila Byock from The Leftovers were really enthusiastic about [You Know You Want This] and it got optioned for a HBO show, which is great. I’ve read two scripts they wrote, and they were brilliant. They really foregrounded the dark humour. It’s one of the most surreal and amazing experiences ever to see how someone else enlarges on the world of your stories.”

This story originally appeared in the May 2019 issue of ELLE Magazine.