This week, I found myself reflecting on the relationship between fiction and reality. In most works of fiction, the copyright page invariably comes with a disclaimer that the characters and events in the work are purely the products of the author’s imagination, even when the content sometimes eerily mirrors reality in the same fashion that many go to church, listen to a sermon and cannot shake off the feeling that the preacher had been stalking them the whole week and was today bent on pulling the mask off their private lives.
My reflections were triggered by an eye-opening saga about two powerful stories that appeared in two leading global literary magazines.
It all began with “Cat Person”, a viral story by Kristen Roupenian that appeared in The New Yorker in 2017. It was the story of a young college student in a relationship with a restaurant worker who happens to be 10 years older. The relationship was not just dispiriting, it wilted once she discovered a new community of friends, ending months of what can be simply described as an embarrassing affair. After an amicable break-up, she moved on to date someone else.
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“Cat Person” exploded online immediately after publication. The BBC described it as “being shared widely online as social media users discuss how much it relates to modern-day dating.” The Washington Post marvelled that “for one of the first times, something in the magazine seemed to capture the experience not of print-oriented older intellectuals but of Millennials.”
The Atlantic called it “a literary adjunct to the latest #MeToo moment”, noting how its portrayal of a young woman navigating awkward romance resonated with “countless women”. It became the most downloaded fiction story in The New Yorker in 2017 and helped Roupenian secure a seven-figure book deal, with her debut collection You Know You Want This earning a $1.2 million (Sh183.6 million) advance. Reviewers pointed out how sharply Roupenian captured “the desperate need to be considered polite and nice at all costs”, a line that instantly entered the cultural bloodstream. Suffice it to say that this was no ordinary story.
Then in July 2021, Alexis Nowicki published a bombshell essay in Slate, a US online magazine known for sharp, conversational analysis of news, culture, politics and society. Titled “Cat Person and Me”, Nowicki’s essay alleged that Roupenian had drawn unmistakable details from her real life and from that of her deceased ex-boyfriend, whom she referred to under the pseudonym “Charles”.
Nowicki further claimed that Roupenian, whom she had never met, had pieced together fragments from her social-media platforms and from an earlier encounter with Charles, transforming those details into a piece of fiction that millions read as emblematic truth.
Twitter went berserk with the ensuing furious public tussle over artistic licence and ethical boundaries. The Guardian’s Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett noted that readers felt “using someone else’s story in this way was unethical”, even if the final work was technically fiction.
Roupenian eventually apologised in an email, admitting that Nowicki’s social-media details had served as a “jumping-off point” for a fictional narrative and that she should have changed identifiable particulars such as Nowicki’s hometown.
Nowicki, for her part, said she did not blame Roupenian, believing the writer could not have foreseen the story’s explosive afterlife.
Yet the whole episode remains a fascinating and troubling case study in the porous border between lived experience and art, where the alchemy that produces great literature can, in the same breath, burn through the fragile right to privacy.
I found the saga fascinating, at a time when, closer home, we have media personalities embroiled in defamation lawsuits after a former lover allegedly infringed on personal privacy in media interviews.
The ‘Cat’ stories saga had me thinking not just about private life, but about instances where writers uncover real stories in the name of autofiction; a hybrid form of writing in which an author blends real-life experiences with invented elements.
In Kenya, for instance, we have had writers tear-gassed for staging political plays or for writing incisive media pieces that may have had uncanny similitude to the crooked ways of the political establishment of the day. So I found myself wondering: could the detention of Wahome Mutahi, whose satire whispered uncomfortable truths, and Ngugi wa Thiong’o for novel works like Ngaahika Ndeenda, have been triggered by what, in private, scared the daylights out of some people in a way that seemed fictitious to us but in reality stepped on very powerful toes?
Talking of Ngugi, is it possible to read, for instance, A Grain of Wheat without relating the main characters to real personalities in Kenya and the roles they played in the country’s chequered history?
Put another way, is it possible to ground a great story of political trauma, such as Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor’s award-winning Dust, on pure fiction, without anchoring it on such historical events such as the Wagalla massacre, extra-judicial killings, political assassinations and the frayed, private griefs of families caught in Kenya’s long political storms?
It is Busolo Wegesa, my stylistics teacher, who whetted my appetite to read works such as Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, a perfect example of how literature works in layers of meaning.
On the surface, a character may be wrestling with a physical reality in a way that reveals deeper meaning in life, in the same way that Captain Ahab obsessively and self-destructively hunts for a great white whale in Melville’s classic, a quest that becomes a powerful allegory of human madness, fate and the peril of trying to master forces beyond our control.
The whole debate on the thin line between fiction and reality leads us to ask another question: is it entirely possible to create a work of art that really resonates with readers and which is not even remotely inspired by real people and events?
Or is artistic licence a kind of cover under which writers get away from trouble by engaging in the kind of circumlocution that enabled George Orwell to parody dictatorial states without falling afoul of the powers-that-were by creating ostensible animal farms that were, in reality, the very human farms that form our daily lives?
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By Henry Munene