Last week, my friend sent me a link to the Slate article “‘Cat Person’ and Me” by Alexis Nowicki. In it, Nowicki describes how the viral, fictional 2017 story “Cat Person” by Kirsten Roupenian was not simply based on but written about Nowicki’s relationship with an older man, despite the fact that Nowicki and Roupenian had never met.

I shot off a simply reply, as memories of classrooms and late-night debates rose in my mind: I have so many thoughts.

I’ve always been a prose writer—dabbling between nonfiction and fiction with an ease that sometimes worked in my benefit and sometimes created problems—and so, while I earned my MFA in fiction, I took as many nonfiction classes as possible. As a result, I often found myself wrestling with the questions raised in Nowicki’s essay, questions that were drilled into me in my nonfiction classes but absent in my fiction ones.

What is truth? Who has the right to tell it? When does point of view become bias? At what point does conveying the emotional truth of a story matter more than adhering to facts? At what point does the creative in creative nonfiction go too far? One professor advised me that if I doubted how to classify a story, I should call it fiction “just to be safe.” But for all the attention we place on parsing out the fictional elements of creative nonfiction, why isn’t the same attention given to fictional stories that bear more truth than elaboration?

“Cat Person” was published as a work of fiction, a label that Roupenian stands by. However, Roupenian admits that she should have changed more true details about Nowicki’s life, particularly the name of Nowicki’s hometown, in order to shield Nowicki’s identity. I applaud this admission and am on Nowicki’s side when she points out that Roupenian wasn’t entirely passive in writing about a story she’d heard secondhand (something many writers, myself included, are guilty of). Instead, Roupenian actively sought out information about Nowicki from social media to use in the character version of Nowicki (named Margot) that Roupenian was creating.

But I also denounce it because it’s lazy writing. Rather than considering Margot as her own fictional character, it seems Roupenian simply swapped in details about Nowicki when needed. However, the fact that Roupenian wrote “Cat Person” while in an MFA program is important context. As Nowicki herself admits, Roupenian was a no-name writer when she submitted “Cat Person” to The New Yorker, never dreaming it would be accepted, much less, go viral. Roupenian was not the first MFA student to take a shortcut in building believable characters by “stealing” from real life, and she won’t be the last. Though now writing teachers everywhere can point to Roupenian’s transgression as its own cautionary tale. 

And yet, I feel like it needs to be said: “Cat Person” is Roupenian’s story. She was inspired by the whispers of a young girl dating a much older man at a school she attended. She knew the man, she gathered details about the girl, and she filled in the rest with her own words and imagination, using her own knowledge of the setting to draw it all together.

Once, when I was agonizing over whether I had the right to publish a nonfiction story about a personal event that would surely cause pain to those who had been involved, a professor gently told me, “You wrote your story. They are free to write theirs if they want.”

I’ve found that despite the personal turmoil that may accompany it, it is easier to write a story when it fits squarely within the bounds of creative nonfiction. Partly because, to the credit of my professors, my nonfiction classmates and I were made painfully aware that writing nonfiction comes with responsibilities: to the emotional truth of the event, to as many of the facts as possible, and to those who experienced the event or might be pained by its retelling.

But as a student who crossed into both worlds, I can attest that fiction writers aren’t raised with the same heavy burdens. We’re taught to simply write, to imagine, to look everywhere and anywhere in real life for inspirations. We’re taught that the best fiction has elements of truth behind it. We’re taught to “write what we know.” We’re taught all this knowing that very label of fiction offers us a form of protection.

What Nowicki’s essay shows us is that perhaps we rely too heavily on the label of fiction to protect us from the consequences of writing fictional true stories. Perhaps, fiction writers should be brought up with the same sense of responsibility to the truth that their nonfiction classmates experience. Perhaps, we simply need to have a broader discussion about the labels of fiction and nonfiction that the writing world depends on so heavily.

There’s no denying the practicalities that come with separating the fiction and nonfiction—even the idea of walking into a bookstore that doesn’t distinguish between the two gives me anxiety. However, fiction and nonfiction are part of a Venn diagram, with prose as its too-often ignored center.

Rather than doubling down on the lines between nonfiction and fiction, what if we simply called for more use of the prose label? By embracing prose for what it really is—a muddled, gray realm in which creativity and truth authentically collide—perhaps we can avoid unfortunate situations like the ones Nowicki and Roupenian experienced. Perhaps we can also open the door for more stories like “Cat Person” that intentionally or not, traverse the wilds between fiction and nonfiction and blur them into something beautiful.