A writer says her relationship with an older man inspired the viral 2017 short story 'Cat Person'

• "Cat Person" is a short story by Kristen Roupenian that was published in The New Yorker in 2017.
• The story went incredibly viral after it was published and is being adapted into a film.
• In an essay for Slate, writer Alexis Nowicki said that the story included details from her life.

"Cat Person," a short story by Kristen Roupenian published by The New Yorker in 2017, was one of the most viral short stories of the digital age. Four years later, its narrative is once again under scrutiny after writer Alexis Nowicki wrote in an essay for Slate that "Cat Person" invoked details from her life and relationship with an older man - and that Roupenian, in an email response, acknowledged that while the main character in the story was not fully based on Nowicki, she had included certain details of her life after meeting the ex-boyfriend.

"Cat Person" is a fictional short story that examines a relationship between Margot, a 20-year-old college student, and Robert, an older man she meets while working at a movie theater. Margot dates the man before eventually pushing him away in repulsion.

The 2017 story generated an online discourse cycle that oscillated between literary judgments of the story, discussions over whether Margot's disgust with Robert's body constituted fat-shaming, and other debates, Vox reported. The story is now being adapted into a feature film starring Nicholas Braun.

As Slate reported at the time, it also generated some confusion among readers who took the story as a personal essay rather than a work of fiction, inspiring questions about whether it was based on Roupenian's own life. According to her, it's not. While she told The New York Times in 2017 that "many of the details and emotional notes come from life," it wasn't an autobiographical story.

But now, according to an essay published on Thursday in Slate titled "'Cat Person' and Me," a great deal of the details in "Cat Person" come not from Roupenian's life, but from Nowicki's.

Nowicki wrote that the story invoked details from her personal life, notably her relationship with a man 15 years her senior whom she referred to by the pseudonym Charles. Even though the story didn't identically match up with her own experiences, some details closely aligned with Nowicki's life. After Charles' death, she wrote, Nowicki learned that he knew Roupenian.

According to the Slate article, Roupenian allegedly said in an email to Nowicki that she had met a man in Ann Arbor (the location of the University of Michigan) and learned through social media that he had a much younger girlfriend, as well as assorted details about that girlfriend's life. Those details served as a "jumping-off point" for a story that was "primarily a work of the imagination," but also drew from Roupenian's own experiences.

Roupenian reportedly said that she didn't find it fair to say that Margot had been wholly based on Nowicki, but that she "can absolutely see why the inclusion of those details in the story would cause [Nowicki] significant pain and confusion."

In the essay, Nowicki reflected on the impact of seeing her life reflected in a viral short story, and how it affected her relationship with Charles himself.

"What's difficult about having your relationship rewritten and memorialized in the most viral short story of all time is the sensation that millions of people now know that relationship as described by a stranger," Nowicki wrote. "Meanwhile, I'm alone with my memories of what really happened-just like any death leaves you burdened with the responsibility of holding onto the parts of a person that only you knew."

Roupenian did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment.