Dear John

An attempt at ficto-criticism.

I’ve been reading Lynne Tillman’s The Complete Madame Realism, a series of “stories” featuring Tillman’s ficto-critical alter-ego, Madame Realism. The back cover describes it as “a new genre of writing that melded fiction, theory, sensation, and critical thought.” Inspired by Tillman, I decided to write a fictive diary entry, featuring a micro-review of Cat Person, a film I saw earlier this month. I guess you can call it autofiction.

No paywall for this extra newsletter this month. Instead, please donate to Palestine Children’s Relief Fund. I’ve also signed the Writers Against the War on Gaza petition, and am committed to being in solidarity with the people of Palestine.

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A few weeks ago, I got drinks with a man I had slept with when I was 20, when I lived in an entirely different city and had an entirely different life. I have since disavowed that blonde and bloated version of my “self,” though I must confess that I do not believe in a fixed self; I only believe in the “I” on the page, privy and pliant to my revisionist instincts.

Perhaps I am afraid of discovering my own inner fixity, which explains my resistance to developing a consistent journaling practice after years of failed attempts and forgotten Moleskins. I’ve burned old journals; I’ve renounced old lovers. In Portugal, I put on a red dress and tottled on my knees, repenting, towards salvation in the form of a statue. At the end of the boardwalk, the Mediterranean Sea before me, I said yes to heaven, mouthing the words, adopting the posture of Lana Del Rey, the patron saint of heartbreak.

James, the man I had slept with when I was 20, remarked that my newsletter “has become quite postmodern.” I was surprised. All this time, he had been keeping up with me. Of course, he said. I have always kept up with you.

Then you would’ve known, I thought to myself. I have always been postmodern and I have always been a fool.

At the same time as I was seeing James, I was also seeing another man, John. I had a thing for boys with Biblical names. Both were unaware of the other’s presence, of course, not that James would’ve minded. John was ten years my senior and much uglier than James — shorter, too, with a receding hairline and a slightly recessed jaw. But what endeared me to him was his unfettered desire for me. Though I couldn’t stand to be in public with him, his bland earnestness charmed me more than his skills in bed. I don’t remember much else about John, aside from his earnest ugliness. I moved to Brooklyn soon after we met. He knew this since our first date, but he still asked me to come visit him. He meant this, too. He always stood by the bus stop, waving until I was out of sight. I wanted to tell him no, but I said maybe. Let him down easy.

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I arrived at the theater early. Instead of watching the trailers, I went into a nearby bodega to buy some smokes and a soda. A boy wearing a beanie followed me in, and introduced himself to me as a “content creator.” He approached me at the cash register and said, “My friends and I are filming a video. Do you want to be in it?” I told him, respectfully, that sounded like the last thing I needed in life. “Damn,” he said and skulked away.

Well, that wasn’t exactly true. The last thing I need in life is a useless man.

On second thought: The last thing I need in life is a murderous man.

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It confuses me when movies have epigraphs. Books are supposed to have epigraphs, not movies. Cat Person begins with a quote by Margaret Atwood: “Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.” That sounds true, the way many clichés start to feel true the more you repeat them. A neat little trick, as the cliché’s meaning dissolves into hollow echolalia.

When Kristen Roupenian’s short story “Cat Person” came out in 2017, it went viral for tapping into 2017’s #MeToo-inflected zeitgeist, a rare feat for a piece of short fiction. The story received overwhelming praise on Twitter, mostly from women, for representing the icky reality of modern dating. It was then optioned into a movie, starring Nicholas Braun (Cousin Greg in Succession) and Emilia Jones, and featuring, inexplicably, Isabella Rossellini.

So here we are.

Cat Person is an old, familiar story (young insecure girl dates older equally insecure man). I suppose no story is original (and no one’s story is original except to themselves), but what makes a story seem new is how it is told, found in the details and the drama of the entire affair. Margot, a 20-year-old college student, works at a movie concession stand, and is asked out by Robert, a 34-year-old regular. They flirt for a few weeks over text before Robert takes her on a movie date. On this date, Margot realizes she doesn’t really like Robert. He’s awkward, a bad kisser, and slightly chubby, but Margot feels implicated in letting things run their course throughout the night (she agrees to get a post-movie drink and reciprocates his advances). She pressures herself into having sex with him, and the sex was bad. She ghosts Robert after the date until a friend takes her phone and texts him: “Hi im not interested in you stop texting me.” Robert responds respectfully, and the matter appeared to be settled until one night, Margot catches sight of him at the student bar. He sends her an onslaught of drunken text messages, concluding with the classic: “Whore.”

The movie appends their courtship with a gruesome and unnecessary third act. Margot’s paranoia gets the better of her, and she begins to suspect that Robert is stalking her. She goes to his home to plant a tracking device on his car to prove this, and is caught red-handed. The confrontation turns violent, and the movie’s second half assumes the tropes of a gory B-horror flick, rather than develop its tension from the psychological ambiguities of Robert’s intents and their interactions. Why did Robert have his Rottweiler hang out around Margot’s dorm? What was his dating history like? Was Margot leading Robert on in her texts? Why was Margot plagued with paralyzing visions of Robert killing her on their dates?

Since its publication, “Cat Person” has become a literary shorthand for the awkward one-night-stands and flings young women find themselves in when they don’t know how to say, “No.” Or perhaps they like the attention and can tolerate someone briefly and consensually (one would hope) drilling into their orifices, treating their vagina like a fossil fuel reservoir. It is, as the kids on TikTok say, a canon event. A necessary plot point in one’s coming-of-age story. You can’t interfere. Reading it now, the spite I once held for Margot has morphed into a patronizing pity — pity, perhaps, for my younger self. John, I realized, was my Robert, and I’ve since dated many more Roberts, a sign of my own folly. I am no better than Margot, just older and less visibly paranoid, though I still harbor traces of Margot’s perverse logic, that I, too, can be “carried away by a fantasy of such pure ego” while straddling an ugly man, his body a safety blanket for my deep-seated insecurities.

Marcia Painting Self-Portrait Using Mirror (1403)

After the movie, I went to a hotel bar to have a drink. I ordered a vodka martini with a lemon twist, and a man named John sat on the stool beside me. He didn’t introduce himself, but I caught a glimpse of his credit card. He paid for my drink and said the next one’s on him. When I raised my hand to order a second drink, he asked me what I was reading, and I stared into his toad-like brown eyes and wondered if he was my John or a new John or a different John I had met once before at a rooftop party in Chelsea. “Pitch Dark,” I told him. “It’s about a woman in Ireland. She’s driving through the night. Everything is pitch dark.”

“You mean pitch black?”

“No, pitch dark.”

“I’m not trying to correct you, sweetheart.”

“It’s fine. I’ve been corrected my whole life,” I told him. “My teeth were so fucked up, I had to get braces when I was ten.”

He left me alone after that, or maybe he didn’t and I tuned him out. My brain kept returning to John, my John, the effect much like reading the same sentence over and over again. But who was my John? What was his job, his address, his political inclinations, if he had any at all? If my John had turned out to be a serial killer, and I was called in to be a witness, I don’t think I would be able to identify him from a line-up of Johns. I doubt Margot, five years later, would remember Robert’s name. He was a blip in her life, a night of bad sex that the brain works hard to suppress. And alcohol smooths out the details. I sipped my second martini. Margot probably thinks about Robert as I think about John — sparingly, as a character from the archives of her memory. An apparition in a hoodie, a faceless driver in a car, an anecdote. Next to human, not quite human.