What it Felt Like When ‘Cat Person’ Went Viral

A personal essay in which Kristen Roupenian writes about the experience of having “Cat Person” — her fictional short story about a young woman who goes through with sex she’d rather not have at the end of a bad date, published in the New Yorker in 2017 — go viral, become the subject of much public debate in the #MeToo era, and be misinterpreted as memoir.