“Write what you know” — advice often levelled at aspiring writers. I’m pretty sure it was Mark Twain who said it first, or most notoriously; the point being we’ve all heard it. It is inarguably sound advice. Writing characters who have had similar experiences, share anxieties and neuroses with us, or ones we’ve had the chance to observe from up close — in friends, enemies, family members –  will inevitably make it easier to step into their shoes, to create literary counterparts who feel nuanced and alive. Concise, decisive but vague as Twain’s advice is, like many of the most popular maxims of our time, it is easy to take out of context, or far too literally. 

“The expectation that fiction is autobiographical is understandable for the simple reason that so much of it is”, wrote Jessica Winter in a 2021 New York Times piece about the recent popularity of work that confronts the nature of truth and the ever-obscure boundary between fact and fiction. In the piece, Winter explains our tendency to assume that most of the contemporary fiction we read is autobiographical. She mentions instances in which authors were interpellated, especially when their work was widely read and discussed, and confirmation of their authority to explore certain subjects in fiction sought in equivalent personal experiences. If we consume fiction with the goal of gaining an insight into an author’s life and emotional world, on the basis of the belief that what we are reading represents an accurate retelling of events, this has severe implications for the writer. Not only does this lead to a series of assumptions being made about authors’ lives, but also about those who have innocently, perhaps even unknowingly, provided inspiration for their novels. People who may very well exist, may be living and breathing, walking around, and who wouldn’t necessarily want to be written about. 

One – egregious – example of real-life people’s anonymity being compromised to a morally dubious extent is the viral short story ‘Cat Person’ by Kristen Roupenian, published in 2017 by The New Yorker and later adapted into a film starring Nicholas Braun. The story follows 20 year-old college student Margot as she meets, goes on a date with, and eventually sleeps with 34 year-old Robert. After a brief first encounter, most of their flirtation occurs via text, allowing Margot’s perception of him to remain somewhat malleable and subject to change. Online, he comes off as harmless and charming, but whenever they meet there is an undertow of fear in Margot’s consciousness. What follows is a drawn-out, disturbing sex scene, in which she realises she might not want to sleep with Robert after all, but feels as though the tact and gentleness required to extricate herself from the situation are simply too much for her to summon. As she goes through the motions and waits for it to be over, she pictures herself from birds-eye, feeling her revulsion turn “to self-disgust and a humiliation that was a kind of perverse cousin to arousal”. After the encounter, she attempts to ghost Robert. Weeks later, she runs into him at a bar, and has her friends sneak her out as she gets hit with a wave of guilt and fear. Robert notices her and the story ends with a series of his texts: first anxious and apologetic, then bitter, and eventually violent, as the chain culminates with him calling her a ‘whore’. 

The most sinister element of the story is the sense of familiarity it instilled in so many young women: it was The New Yorker’s most downloaded piece of fiction that year, as its fraught depiction of gender and power relations seemed to epitomise some unspoken truth about the experience of modern dating, sparking an animated debate online. Four years later, a woman called Alexis Nowicki published an essay in Slate magazine. In it, she recounts the experience of leaving a movie theatre to be met with a flurry of notifications from friends and old colleagues all sharing the same link: “Is this about you? Did you write this under a pen name?”. Nowicki describes having to sit down on the subway as she read ‘Cat Person’, overwhelmed as she was by the eerie sensation of finding uncanny similarities between her and a fictional character in the short story that was breaking the internet. She, too, had dated an older man when she was in college. Her ex-boyfriend Charles (a pseudonym), like Robert, wore a rabbit fur hat and had a tattoo on his shoulder. His house had fairy lights on the porch, posters and board games inside like in the story. Roupenian seemed to know everything: her hometown, her college dorm, the art house cinema where she worked. She knew where their first date had been, and about his two cats. Unlike the brief, uncomfortable encounter in the story, however, Nowicki retains a positive memory of her relationship with Charles, who was a gentle, loving partner to her, and who, she reveals in her essay, has since passed away. After asking some of Charles’ friends and, eventually, Roupenian herself, Nowicki found out that Roupenian had met Charles, heard about his relationship with her, and taken information from her social media accounts as a “jumping off point” for the story.

Even with her first-hand knowledge of who Charles was as a person and of their relationship dynamic, Nowicki found herself susceptible to the power of narrative: “sometimes, to my own disappointment, I find myself inclined to trust Roupenian over myself. Had Charles actually been pathetic and exploitative, and I simply hadn’t understood it because I, like Margot, was young and naïve? (…) The story is so confident and sure, helping the reader to see things Margot herself does not.” 

The identification of real-life elements in ‘Cat Person’ extended beyond Nowicki’s essay. Many, especially men, dismissed it as a whiny diary entry, reading it as a personal essay rather than a serious piece of fiction, in spite of Roupenian’s many attempts to remind audiences that the story was, in fact, a work of the imagination. On the one hand, Roupenian submitting her short story to The New Yorker was a long shot.  At this point in her writing career, she had published a single story in a print magazine. How could she have known ‘Cat Person’ would be accepted, let alone get millions of hits? “In retrospect, I was wrong not to go back and remove those biographical details (…). Not doing so was careless”, she apologised to Nowicki. Nowicki still felt slighted: “I was angry, still—that someone who knows so intensely about what it’s like to watch your readers misconstrue fiction as autobiography would have dragged others, without their knowledge, into that discomfort.”

In a college with such a rich literary heritage, that boasts a number of beloved alumni authors in its ranks, many of whom have transfigured their experience at Trinity in their novels (with the Trinity Novel  becoming its own sub-genre), this is not an unthinkable series of events. How many of us have, through the veil of fiction, dragged an ex through the dirt or aired our family’s dirty laundry in a creative writing workshop? What if one of those stories made it out of the class? What if, despite the typos you missed and the fact that you drunkenly submitted it minutes before the midnight deadline, it got into Icarus? What if it got into The New Yorker?

Of course, fiction is always going to be personal in some way – how can we not draw from real life? I have a Notes app folder of funny things people have said to me with the very intention of slipping them into a story. My first piece of fiction to be published in a literary magazine independent of college began with a conversation I had at a house party with someone in my course. 

As Zadie Smith put it in her defense of fiction for The New York Review of Books, “Our social and personal lives are a process of continual fictionalisation, as we internalise the other-we-are-not, dramatise them, imagine them, speak for them and through them. The accuracy of this fictionalisation is never guaranteed, but without an ability to at least guess at what the other might be thinking, we could have no social lives at all.”

I do think it’s okay to write stories about the people we know. I also think that, in doing so, we have an unequivocal responsibility to do right by them, to change things, leave out details that make them recognisable. If they’re someone you love, maybe even give them a heads up about a character that may or may not remind them of someone. If they were truly evil to you, though, why not keep the same initial.