In a relatively calm year for literary drama, (we were all too busy worrying about the collapsing republic, I guess,) it was a fun few days on Twitter when a short story made everyone lose their collective shit. I love talking about literature online! It reminds me of when online was fun! However, it became immediately less fun when it appeared that the only acceptable response to “Cat Person” was to revel in its perfection and reliability.

As soon as people came forward with objections to the story, others took to the mantle of attacking the dissenters. I’m generally game for a fight, but instead of defending the writing of “Cat Person” itself, people were dismissing the criticisms of those who expressed opinions anywhere on the spectrum of “meh” to negative. People who were nonplussed by the writing were lumped in with the men whose reactions were recorded in infamy in the account Men react to Cat Person.

In what world is a woman sharing her critical opinion of a piece of writing the same thing as a man trashing a female narrator, or defending the repellent antagonist? These are very different reactions, but it’s a kneejerk habit on the internet (not just the literary internet, all parts of the stupid internet), that any dissenting opinion can be lumped in with the ‘trolls’ and the ‘haters.’ It’s pointless to engage with the trolls, they say, which is true, when the designation is accurate—but critics are not trolls, and categorizing the two together eliminates the space for productive and fascinating dialogue. This attitude allows both the creator and the ad hoc army of defenders of the creator to dismiss critical questions about a work, its craft, and its function, instead of engage with them.

I read “Cat Person,” like everyone else, the week it came out. Two months earlier, I’d read Leopoldine Core’s masterful story “Hog For Sorrow.” Though its protagonist is an amateur erotic massage therapist rather than a college student, both protagonists are young women attempting to navigate male-defined narratives and reflecting on their place within stories. The themes and interiority were similar, but to my read, Core’s work was deeper, more nuanced, eloquently precise, with the je ne sais quoi that makes a story move from “It was good” to “I will think about this every day until I die.”

“He, like, reprimanded me for eating a corn muffin.” [The protagonist says.]

“What an asshole.”

“It was like he wanted me to be dead. Like I was interfering with my potential hotness by living.”

This line slaughtered me, in its simplicity, in it’s horror, how it encapsulated in just nineteen words what I have felt for my entire life when men watch me existing with revulsion.

I did not have a line I could recall from Cat Person that shifted my gravity, but I reread the story to look for something I might call a favorite. This is the closest I came:

“Yeah, right, she thought, and then he was on top of her again, kissing her and weighing her down, and she knew that her last chance of enjoying this encounter had disappeared, but that she would carry through with it until it was over.”

Having also had bad sex, I of course felt the specific recognition of resignation upon reading this passage. But it didn’t change me. It didn’t bring me to a new sense of understanding and insight about the extremely demoralizing ways that men and women interact. It just made me think, “yep.”

In a piece for the New Republic, critic Jo Livingstone said that defenders of the story “snarled at the unimpressed’s incomprehension of Roupenian’s achievement.” That being her grasp on the internal monologue of a woman. This strikes me as a blanket reduction. Of course there are people of whom this is true, but at least in the circles I quietly spoke about the story, we understood the achievement of bringing a reader into the mind of a woman full well, and had read others achieve it before, at a higher pitch, with little recognition from either the literary community or the general public.

In “Adrien Brody,” Marie Calloway also wrote about the strange dynamic created through the exchange of virtual communication prior to a real life romantic reckoning. She also wrote intimately about the experience of an older man falling from a place of elevated mental grace despite his initial persona. She brings the awkwardness of the encounter alive. When you’re reading, you can feel the anxiety mounting in your own nerve endings.

It all comes down to taste. “I felt annoyed he was only focused on his own feelings, after he had just shot a load on my face.” [Says Calloway’s protagonist.] This guts me in a way that nothing in Cat Person did. The story is by no means perfect, it’s raw and bare and there are moments of confusing dialogue. Even so, women have been writing candidly and clearly about men and their behavior in modern dating for a long time. It’s certainly possible that “Cat Person” is the first time so many have been exposed to it: I wasn’t surprised when my journalist friends were bowled over by the story: they don’t spend their days seeking out groundbreaking literary fiction. But the ‘literary twitter’ crowd does do precisely this. Why then the nearly unanimous blind adoration? Is it possible that “Cat Person” is the first time so many have been exposed to it?

The underlying commentary in “Adrien Brody” on power differentials, age differences, intellectualism, and man children, is a conversation that Calloway began long before it was in vogue. A close reader recognizes the ways that her male counterpart consistently, subtly, underestimates Calloway as a writer and thinker throughout their interactions, but you’re never hit over the head with his condescension.

Perhaps this is simply a part of the classic pattern of pioneers being derided and criticized. In an interview with Tao Lin, Sarah Nicole Prickett said of Calloway: “I just don’t know if she’s a writer yet, that’s all. Maybe she’s a writer. I don’t think she’s doing anything else. I will say that she seems to be a slightly better writer than a sex worker.” She continues: “She doesn’t seem like you would have a conversation with her and she would be quick, like she would be able to connect things.”

The pattern continues: several years pass and the ideas expressed by said pioneers are ready for mainstream consumption, and behold as writers who are less formally experimental and more easily digestible achieve staggering success for a derivation of the formula. Five years later, “Cat Person” gets adoration and a seven-figure book advance without the controversy heaped upon the author, and critics of Calloway (Prickett, again,) call “Cat Person” “ingeniously done.”