Kristen Roupenian on sex, power and viral fame: ‘Our emotions are outsized – someone doesn’t return a text and you want to murder everyone’

As she releases her debut short story collection, the Massachusetts-born author speaks to Olivia Petter about success, Trump, and being asked to give relationship advice on the street

‘Heterosexual sex is a space where shifting power dynamics are colliding,’ says Kristen Roupenian (Elisa Roupenian Toha)

Fiction is not supposed to go viral. And yet, just over a year ago, a 7,000-word short story became an internet sensation.

Kristen Roupenian’s “Cat Person” was published by The New Yorker on Monday 4 December and by that Friday, it was the most-read piece of fiction of all time on the magazine’s website. It earned its author – who was then completing a writing fellowship in Ann Arbor, Michigan – global fame, quickly followed by a seven-figure, two-book deal.

“It was my girlfriend, Callie, who realised that something was going on with the story,” the 37-year-old tells me, leaning forward on a velvet-covered stool in a quiet boutique hotel in central London. She is petite in frame, but one look at her sharp pixie haircut and intense blue eyes – which are fittingly cat-like – and it’s clear she’s not to be underestimated. “Callie works in publishing,” she continues, “and could see people in the industry tweeting about a short story that had gone viral.”

Roupenian avoided reading reactions at first – partly because they made her anxious, and partly because, “Twitter ignorant” by her own assessment, she couldn’t actually work out how to find them: “It didn’t occur to me to search my own name.”

Inspired by a “nasty” dating encounter with someone Roupenian had met online, “Cat Person” tells the story of Margot, a 20-year-old student working in a cinema, and Robert, a 34-year-old man who may or may not have cats. After an initial spark and some playful text exchanges, the two go on a date that ends awkwardly: Margot decides she doesn’t want to have sex with Robert, but does so anyway for fear of coming across as “spoiled and capricious”. Later, she breaks things off with him, prompting him to send a series of drunken messages that culminate with him calling her a whore.

The story’s unprecedented success has been discussed at length, and while theories vary, the common thread is that people related to it. Some praised the verisimilitude of Margot’s interior monologue (“when she asked him a question and he didn’t reply right away she felt a jab of anxious yearning”), particularly young female readers. Many identified with her yo-yoing between attraction and repulsion, and what it feels like to wrestle with the two. Others felt uncomfortable as they recognised Margot’s narcissism in themselves – she turns herself on by imagining Robert’s arousal.

Meanwhile, Robert’s depiction as a blank misogynist elicited such a visceral reaction among certain men that a Twitter account (@MenCat Person) was launched just to document – and lampoon – their indignation.

“I felt like I’d been struck by lightning,” Roupenian recalls of the moment she eventually overcame her tussle with Twitter. “Loads of people congratulated me on the story going viral but I didn’t celebrate it. It was just scary. One friend said I must be feeling disorientated. I was like, ‘Yes I f***ing am’. Pardon me,” she adds quickly.

Roupenian is animated when she talks. She makes impassioned gestures with her arms, bangs her hand on the table and practically fizzes as she responds to my questions. It’s as if she’s been waiting for someone to ask her about “Cat Person” for months, despite having now done countless interviews on the subject.

It wasn’t just that the observations in “Cat Person” on consent, coercion and sexual power play were insightful – they were timely, too. Roupenian wrote it before the #MeToo movement took off, but by the time it had come out, its central themes were at the heart of worldwide social scrutiny. “The story was powered by #MeToo,” she explains. “But it wasn’t like anything had changed. People were just suddenly looking around, like, ‘Oh my God, things have been really bad for a really long time’ and they were hungry for a chance to talk about the uncomfortable stuff they felt they couldn’t before.”

But this had been brewing before #MeToo, she adds. Roupenian wrote “Cat Person” in the spring of 2017, shortly after Donald Trump became president. She recalls listening to the infamous “grab ’em by the pussy” tape on Access Hollywood.

“The story came out of my own feelings at that time,” she recollects. “A couple months after the inauguration, I cut off all my hair. I was like, ‘f*** it’. I’d always wanted to do it, but I vaguely felt like I shouldn’t because it might make me look bad. But there was a part of me that was like, ‘playing by the rules serves you f***ing nothing’.”

Roupenian’s new collection has been optioned for an HBO series

It’s with this renegade spirit that Roupenian serves up her new, and far more macabre, fictional platter: a collection entitled You Know You Want This. Rather than a kind of “Cat Person” by the dozen, Roupenian’s newer stories probe into the darkest corners of the human psyche. Some are realistic tales of friendship and teenage angst, but others plunge the reader into a brave new sexual dystopia involving monsters and mutilation. The collection opens with “Bad Boy”, a disturbing tale about sadomasochism, before taking the reader on an unexpected journey of magical realism with stories like “The Mirror, the Bucket, and the Old Thigh Bone”, where a princess falls hopelessly in love with her own reflection, and “Scarred”, in which a woman literally maims the man of her dreams as part of a bizarre spell.

The characters are bloodthirsty (“Ellie was a biter”), the imagery violent (“The only way Ted could get hard was to pretend that his dick was a knife, and that the woman he was f***ing was stabbing herself with it”). It makes sense, then, that Roupenian’s favourite genre of fiction is horror.

“It’s a natural space for talking about power,” she explains, adding that this, not sex, is the overarching theme of her work. “In everyday life, it can feel like your emotions are so outsized compared to what’s actually happening to you. Like, someone doesn’t return a text and you decide you want to murder everyone. One of the things horror can do is match the circumstances to your emotions. It can pull the ambient anxiety out of the air and squeeze it into a single controllable and identifiable thing that can then get purged or confronted.”

We see this manifest in some of Roupenian’s more surreal stories, such as “Sardines”, in which the child of a single mum gets her birthday wish by turning her party guests, including her father’s new girlfriend, into a gruesome, multi-limbed monster (“a body that doesn’t cheat or divorce”).

Roupenian herself is a child of divorce, and suspects this is why she’s so drawn to investigating the shifting power dynamics between men and women in her work. “Anyone who comes from a family of divorce feels the decisions of other people had a huge impact on their life,” she explains, “which is definitely something I channel into my writing by posing questions like, ‘How does that person justify their actions?’ and ‘What does it mean to be a woman in a world where most of the power lies with men?’”

These are ideas she explores within the framework of heterosexual sex, she adds, “because it’s a space where all of these things are colliding”.

Aside from “The Good Guy”, a masterful vignette of a man whose splenetic response to female rejection completely shatters the “nice guy” trope, it’s the women in Roupenian’s stories who emerge as autonomous, not the men. The most obvious example of this is in “Biter”, one of the few stories Roupenian wrote after “Cat Person” had come out. A woman named Ellie fantasises about biting her attractive male colleague, but manages to suppress her urges until he sexually harasses her at the office Christmas party. “That was awful,” she says to herself, before realising “Oh right. Here’s my chance” and lunging for his cheekbone, “which cracked spectacularly beneath her teeth”.

“It’s the story with the most direct reference to #MeToo,” Roupenian explains, pointing to the workplace setting but also its unexpected – and rather satisfying – resolution: a woman is harassed by a man, so she takes the opportunistic step of punishing him personally. “If a woman bit a man in an office environment,” Roupenian writes in the story, “there would be a strong assumption that the man had done something to deserve it.”

While stories such as this are extreme examples, Roupenian insists they serve to highlight a very relevant, and slightly bleak, reality. “These stories are about women who want something, take it and then walk off stage without consequence. You can do that in fiction, but not in the real world.”

You Know You Want This has been optioned for an HBO series (“it’s like Black Mirror but for sex and relationships”) and a novel is in the works, though she’s too superstitious to talk about that right now.

Prior to “Cat Person”, Roupenian had enjoyed minor success with a handful of short stories, published mostly online. But writing had never been a first choice of vocation. She grew up in Plymouth, Massachusetts, studied English and psychology at Barnard, and then volunteered with the Peace Corps in Kenya for nearly two years. After that, she worked as a nanny before enrolling at Harvard for a PhD in African Literature.

She now gets approached on the street by fans asking for dating advice. “I think it’s so funny – like, listen to me!” she laughs.

It’s at this point that I’m introduced to Callie, who has been sitting at a nearby table throughout our conversation. She asks Roupenian for the key to their hotel room. “Oh, I don’t have it,” she says, before turning to me, shrugging her shoulders and giggling, “Well, I guess we’re locked out!”

As Callie is whisked upstairs by the hotel concierge, we continue our chat. Is she happy about how drastically her life has changed? “There are individual things that make me very, very happy,” she says, citing the news that The New Yorker was going to run “Cat Person” and that her book would be published, “but those are rarer than the things that just feel like upheaval.

“A lot of the things I knew made me happy were the things that were predictable, like my routine and my small circle of friends. Now a lot of that is gone.” Her voice slows for the first time.

“My feelings aren’t pure happiness mostly,” she continues. “It’s exhaustion and excitement and curiosity. There are good feelings, but I think it takes time to become happy in any new situation and all this is very new.”

Taking a sip from a so-far-untouched water glass, she pauses to contemplate the peculiarity of her newfound fame.

“Fiction writers aren’t supposed to be out telling everyone what they think all the time,” she continues. “But I tell myself this will end, and eventually I’ll have enough money so that I can just keep writing… That makes me happy.”

You Know You Want This by Kristen Roupenian is out now, published by Jonathan Cape