Kristen Roupenian is an American writer, most famous for "Cat Person," a New Yorker short story that went viral. She attended Barnard College before joining the Peace Corps and teaching public health and HIV education in Kenya. She completed her Ph.D. in English at Harvard in 2014, and her MFA at the University of Michigan in 2017. Before "Cat Person," she had only been published in small literary journals. With "Cat Person," she achieved unexpected fame, realizing after the story's publication that it had become a viral success. She is emblematic of a certain generation of millennial contemporary fiction writers, and has drawn comparisons to other writers from Lena Dunham to Sally Rooney.
In January 2019, she published a collection of short stories entitled You Know You Want It: "Cat Person" and Other Stories. The collection debuted to mixed reviews, with some critics describing it as "weird and pervy" or "dull and needy." Much like "Cat Person," the stories in her collection typically deal with themes of miscommunication, power imbalance, and sadism.
Her work has been optioned for film and TV adaptation. She wrote a horror screenplay for independent film production house A24, and has penned a short story collection to be adapted into an anthology drama series for HBO.
"Cat Person" is a short story published in The New Yorker in December 2017, which quickly went viral, attaining significant praise on the internet, especially within certain feminist circles.
The story is told from the point of view of Margot, a...
