Kristen Roupenian’s debut collection, You Know You Want This (Cape, £12.99), comes hotly anticipated. Her short story, ‘Cat Person’, went viral when the New Yorker printed it in December 2017, becoming the second most read article published by the magazine that year. Told in an apparently simple, confessional voice, it recounts 20-year-old Margot’s courtship with 34-year-old Robert, beginning when she flirts while selling him sweets at an art-house cinema, building via text messages, culminating in a night of terrible (for Margot) sex from which she can’t quite be bothered to extricate herself, and continuing in the nasty afterlife of Robert’s increasingly aggressive texts.
Everyone read it and everyone argued about it. Twitter even spawned the account @MenCatPerson, charting men’s reactions to the story, then women’s responses to these reactions, and so on — because what appears to be an easy read, in fact cannily delineates the subtle shifts in power dynamics within a relationship, chiming with bigger conversations about consent and #MeToo.
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