Your story in this week’s issue, “Cat Person,” is both an excruciating bad-date story and, I think, a kind of commentary on how people get to know each other, or don’t, through electronic communication. Where did the idea for the story come from?
The story was inspired by a small but nasty encounter I had with a person I met online. I was shocked by the way this person treated me, and then immediately surprised by my own shock. How had I decided that this was someone I could trust? The incident got me thinking about the strange and flimsy evidence we use to judge the contextless people we meet outside our existing social networks, whether online or off.
Especially in the early stages of dating, there’s so much interpretation and inference happening that each interaction serves as a kind of Rorschach test for us. We decide that it means something that a person likes cats instead of dogs, or has a certain kind of artsy tattoo, or can land a good joke in a text, but, really, these are reassuring self-deceptions. Our initial impression of a person is pretty much entirely a mirage of guesswork and projection. When I started writing the story, I had the idea of a person who had adopted all these familiar signifiers as a kind of camouflage, but was something else—or nothing at all—underneath.
Margot’s sense of Robert and his motivations keeps shifting throughout the story. She repeatedly changes her mind about him. Do you think that she ever actually interprets his thoughts or behavior correctly?
Margot keeps trying to construct an image of Robert based on incomplete and unreliable information, which is why her interpretation of him can’t stay still. The point at which she receives unequivocal evidence about the kind of person he is is the point at which the story ends.
Do you think that the connection that these two form through texting is a genuine one?
I think it’s genuine enough as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go very far. That Robert is smart and witty is true, but does the fact that someone’s smart and witty mean that he won’t murder you (as Margot wonders more than once), or assault you, or say something nasty to you if you reject him? Of course it doesn’t, and the vertigo that Margot feels at several points in the story is the recognition of that uncertainty: it’s not that she knows that Robert is bad—because if she knew that she would be on solid ground—but that she doesn’t know anything at all.
Quite a bit of the story takes places through dialogue, whether face to face or via text. How hard is it to write dialogue that feels natural—or, in this case, that feels naturally stilted?
The first draft of the story came fairly easily—I wrote it in a feverish burst—but I did feel self-conscious, afterward, about the verisimilitude of the texts, especially because Margot is younger than I am and there’s nothing more embarrassing than someone older trying to mimic the communication style of a slightly different generation. There are fewer of her texts in the story for that reason. I liked writing Robert’s side of the conversation, on the other hand, in part because I felt like I was his analogue as a writer: both of us were trying to imitate how someone younger would talk, always on the verge of a slip that would give the game away.
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The subject of nonconsensual sex—between older men and younger women, in particular—has been very much in the news lately. Do you think of this encounter, which is, at times, cringe-inducing for the reader, as a consensual one? Will Margot remember it as such?
Well, he buys her alcohol, even though he knows she’s underage, and he tells her that he thinks she’s drunk right before he takes her home. So I don’t think his hands are entirely clean. But I’m more interested in the way that Margot herself weighs the costs of her own decision to consent.
Margot, choosing between having sex she doesn’t want and “seeming spoiled and capricious,” decides to have unwanted sex. She thinks (or tells herself) that she isn’t afraid that Robert will “force” her, and I think, on one level, that’s true: she has no evidence that he’d be violent toward her. At the same time, she’s already speculated about the possibility that he could kill her and has become anxiously aware that she’s entirely in his territory, that he could have rooms full of “corpses or kidnap victims or chains.”
Louis C.K., who has obviously been in the news a lot lately, echoed Margaret Atwood’s line “Men are afraid women will laugh at them, women are afraid men will kill them” in a standup routine, by talking about how the equivalent of a woman going on a date with a man would be a man going on a date with a half-bear, half-lion. In the bar, Margot thinks of Robert as “a large, skittish animal, like a horse or a bear,” that she is taming, coaxing to eat from her hand. But what would happen if she stopped trying to coax and pet and charm him—if she said, bluntly, that she doesn’t want him, that she’s not attracted to him, that she’s changed her mind?
That option, of blunt refusal, doesn’t even consciously occur to her—she assumes that if she wants to say no she has to do so in a conciliatory, gentle, tactful way, in a way that would take “an amount of effort that was impossible to summon.” And I think that assumption is bigger than Margot and Robert’s specific interaction; it speaks to the way that many women, especially young women, move through the world: not making people angry, taking responsibility for other people’s emotions, working extremely hard to keep everyone around them happy. It’s reflexive and self-protective, and it’s also exhausting, and if you do it long enough you stop consciously noticing all the individual moments when you’re making that choice.
It’s in this context that Margot decides to have sex with Robert. In order to avoid an uncomfortable, possibly risky exchange, she “bludgeons her resistance into submission” with a shot of whiskey. Then, later, she wonders why the memories of the encounter make her feel so sick and scared, and she blames herself for overreacting, for not being kinder to Robert, who, after all, didn’t do anything wrong.
We know that Margot is a college student, but we never find out what Robert does for a living. Is that intentional? Do you know?
I left a lot about Robert intentionally vague, because I wanted people to be able to share in that shiver Margot feels when she enters his house: Wait, who is this guy? He could be anyone.
I do think there’s a hint of class tension in the story: Robert teases Margot about her “highbrow” taste in movies, and repeatedly brings up her college education in a way that (in my mind) suggests the possibility that he hasn’t gone to college himself. Margot, certainly, interprets his behavior in this way: she believes that he’s intimidated by her, that she has the upper hand, and this appeals to her. I can imagine Margot not asking Robert what he does, because she intuits that he might be sensitive about answering the question. But is she right? Maybe he’s playing to her ego by pretending that she intimidates him; maybe he’s trying to undermine her by implying that she’s a snob; maybe he talks a lot about the fact that she’s in college because he’s fetishized the idea of dating a college girl. Again, we don’t know. Margot, and the reader, can project practically anything onto Robert, because there’s so little there.
Which of these characters do you feel the most sympathy for, at the end of the story?
Well, at the end of the story, Robert calls Margot a “whore,” so I hope that most people lose sympathy for him then. But, for most of the story, I wanted to leave a lot of space for people to sympathize with Robert, or at least, like Margot, to be able to imagine a version of him—clueless, but well-meaning—that they can sympathize with. I wanted that version of Robert to exist alongside the possibility of a much more sinister one.
I have more genuine sympathy for Margot, but I’m also frustrated by her: she’s so quick to over-read Robert, to assume that she understands him, and to interpret his behavior in a way that’s flattering to herself. I think it’s telling that the moment of purest sexual satisfaction she experiences in the story is the one when she imagines what Robert sees as he looks at her: she’s seduced by the vision she’s created of herself—of someone perfect and beautiful and young. So much of dating involves this interplay of empathy and narcissism: you weave an entire narrative out of a tiny amount of information, and then, having created a compelling story about someone, you fall in love with what you’ve created.
The moment when I feel the most sympathy for Margot is when, after she spends the entire story wondering about Robert—what he’s thinking, feeling, doing—she is left marvelling the most at herself, and at her own decision to have sex with him, “at this person who’d just done this bizarre, inexplicable thing.”
This is your first story in The New Yorker, and you haven’t yet published a book. Have you been writing fiction for long? Are you working on a book?
I always wanted to be a writer, but I spent most of my twenties doing anything and everything else. I did the Peace Corps in Kenya, and I was a nanny for a while, and then I spent a long time in graduate school, studying African literature. It’s only in the past five years that I’ve really committed myself to writing fiction. I just completed an M.F.A. at the University of Michigan, and I’m putting the finishing touches on a short-story collection. I’m also at work on a novel.
