Bad Cat Helicopter

On Who Owns a Story and Who Gets to Tell It

I want to make sure we’re on the same page, first of all: When we—as a society—all pile on a conversation on Twitter together and refer to that as “discourse,” we’re using the term discourse to be funny, right? I mean, yes, technically, it is discourse but isn’t that just a way of saying we’re all talking about a trending topic but making it sound serious, in the interest of making everything funnier?

Help, my sense of humor depends on taking things too seriously because it’s funny to do so.

Today’s Shelf Life is about a Bad Cat Helicopter. Or perhaps an Attack Art Person. Cat Helicopter Friend. I Identify as a Bad Cat Friend. Kidney Person. Bad Kidney Cat? (We have a bad kidney cat in the family, unfortunately.) I Sexually Identify as a Subpoenaed Group Chat.

Yesterday during the Bad Art Friend zeitgeist a number of people in the literary fiction community were asking whether this was just the Cat Person discourse all over again but just as I was about to make a sarcastic comment about how they should make an effort to be more mature and grounded like the sci fi and fantasy community I remembered the Helicopter Story situation and I had to bite my tongue. We must all tend our own gardens.

It’s been a weird year in the fiction-writing community and I want to capture this bizarre moment in time and Twitter discourse so I can look back on it later and contemplate what even was going on this year. Years from now I will look back on a message about chasing down the zebras that are loose right now in PG County, Maryland, and I won’t remember if there were really zebras or if it was all an elaborate euphemism for something I’ve forgotten.

I don’t want that to happen to the year of the Helicopter Story-Cat Person-Bad Art Friend state of affairs. Fix this moment in your mind. Try to remember where you were, between the day Facebook went down for seven hours costing Mark Zuckerberg $6 billion and the day Twitch leaked every bit of data they ever had onto the web and we got mad that streamers make money from their content.

Sometimes a literary phenomenon comes along and it’s the thing everybody is talking about together for at least five minutes. Usually these are in the form of a book or story everybody read and wants to talk about. Stories that get a lot of market penetration and buzz. I was planning to write about this soon. I thought I was going to be writing about Never Saw Me Coming by Vera Kurian, which shows signs of being the next—well, the next that thing I just said.

I try to read literary phenomena when they come around because I consider that part of my job. That means I read stuff that’s good but I’m not interested in (nonfiction usually) and sometimes I read stuff that’s downright not at all my cup of tea (like Fifty Shades). If there’s something that many people are excited about reading, it’s part of my job to know about it. Also, I don’t talk smack about media I haven’t consumed myself. Don’t come at me with the “I haven’t read Twilight I just know it’s terrible” line. I’ll end you.

We’ve had three writing-community-slash-reading-public phenomena in the last twelve months that were big enough to attract mainstream media notice, with coverage in Vox, Slate, and now the New York Times. I can’t say whether laypeople are talking about these or not but they’ve been covered in these major outlets for the general public so I’m pretty impressed.

Is this like climate change? Is the rapid-fire speed with which we’re now pelted with these outrageous literary circumstances a sign that the end is nigh?

In January 2020, Clarkesworld published “I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter” by Isabel Fall. The story has since been removed from Clarkesworld by Fall’s request and republished under the title “Helicopter Story.” “Helicopter Story” is a finalist for the 2021 Hugo for Best Novelette (fiction 7,500 to 17,500 words) and is competing against, among others, Meg Elison’s “The Pill,” which is also excellent. You can read the original “Helicopter Story” archived here.

The phrase “I sexually identify as an attack helicopter” comes from a transphobic meme that never really stops making the rounds on the internet and attempts to ask the question, “so anyone can just identify as anything, huh?” Isabel Fall, a transgender woman, coopted the text of this meme to title her story about Barb, a pilot in a future American civil war whose gender identity has been reassigned by the military to “helicopter” to improve Barb’s combat acumen; and Barb’s companion and gunner, Axis, whose gender identity has also been reassigned to “helicopter.”

Fall received so much backlash and harassment as a result of the publication of “Attack Helicopter” that she asked Neil Clarke to withdraw it and then checked into a hospital. The backlash was not from transphobes and TERFs but from the overly conscientious left (including many cisgender people), who were concerned that this story had been written by a transphobe or a TERF for the purpose of harming transgender people. You can read Emily VanDerWerff’s coverage of the entire Attack Helicopter situation in Vox here.

On December 4, 2017, Kristen Roupenian’s short story “Cat Person” was published by The New Yorker. “Cat Person” is a story about a twenty-year-old undergraduate student, Margot, who has a brief and uncomfortable fling with a thirty-four-year-old creep named Robert. The story was well-received and enjoyed wide readership (normal for The New Yorker). Soon after publication Alexis Nowicki—who had never met nor even heard of Roupenian—began receiving messages from friends wondering if she had written “Cat Person” herself under a pen name or if she knew Roupenian.

The details in “Cat Person” were an uncanny match for Nowicki’s life. She contacted the much-older man with whom she had a relationship in college and brought the story to his attention; he vaguely agreed the similarities were “weird” but didn’t offer further information. After spending three years wondering how Roupenian had gleaned so many concrete details of her life and relationship, Nowicki learned that her ex had passed away. She learned after his death that he had met Roupenian after his relationship with Nowicki ended, and that “Cat Person” was, after all, based on them and particularly Nowicki. Nowicki wrote an article on the situation for Slate, published in July 2021.

Earlier this week the Bad Art Friend story broke around the internet and it’s the most fascinating yet. In 2015, a woman named Dawn Dorland did an altruistic kidney donation—meaning she donated a kidney with no one in mind for it, to go to a stranger in need. She then proceeded to tell everyone she could get to listen about the kidney donation, including author Sonya Larson, a woman with whom Dorland had participated in some writing workshops years before. My favorite quote from Dorland on this subject is about a writers conference she attended after the donation:

“I left that conference with this question: Do writers not care about my kidney donation?”

I mean this is really the eternal dramatic question, right? Do writers care about my kidney donation? Or don’t they?

Anyway, some time later, Larson published a story called “The Kindest,” in which a wealthy white woman donates a kidney to a marginalized stranger but whose motives are only one part altruism to several parts narcissism. After learning about the story, Dorland reached out to Larson repeatedly—for what reason isn’t totally clear, it seems that she wanted credit for “inspiring” the story, which at that time was not yet published and Dorland had not read.

When Dorland did not get the reaction she wanted from Larson, Dorland went on a rampage to discredit Larson: She contacted publishers and employers, even the media, to tell anyone who would listen that Larson had stolen her life story. Larson wasn’t entirely honest about the situation, either—Dorland had published on Facebook a letter to the recipient of her kidney, which Larson lifted phrases from and reproduced in “The Kindest.” Dorland is suing Larson on copyright infringement grounds—and subpoenaed group chat records from Larson’s writers’ group support her case—while Larson is countersuing for defamation.

On an unrelated note, I want it to be known for all time that if my group chat records should ever be subpoenaed I will be faking my own death and starting a new life somewhere else.

You can read the New York Times article “Who Is the Bad Art Friend?” for yourself. I do not have a link to “The Kindest,” as it seems to be available only as a paid purchase at this time.

I wanted the summary of these three controversies to be succinct, and it was not. For that, I am sorry. I also wanted to give you enough information that reading the linked articles would not be necessary to enjoy this article. For that, you’re welcome.

In the cases of “Cat Person” and “The Kindest,” the controversy, at least as Nowicki and Dorland saw it, was in the details of their lives being borrowed without notice or consent by authors for fiction. 

Although Dorland later discovered that early published versions of “The Kindest” had directly reproduced text from her letter in a way that may violate copyright, her harassment of Larson started as soon as she heard that someone she knew had written a story about a kidney donation without involving her.

Dorland seems to be guilty mostly of being unlikable, of being performative in her altruism, and of mistaking casual acquaintance (with Larson and the Chunky Monkeys writing group) for friendship. The group chat participants are cruelly scathing in their criticism of Dorland. The Bad Art Friend story has no likable characters.

In Nowicki’s case, the story is more gray. The person who had an ethical obligation to Nowicki was the man she dated, who supplied enough details of his relationship with her to Roupenian that the author was able to put those details together with publicly available information (place names, for instance) to make an eerily accurate fictional version of the relationship.

In the “Cat Person” situation, Nowicki is an innocent victim and the bad actor is her ex, who withheld information from her (that he knew Roupenian and had supplied her with the details for the story) and allowed her to spend years wondering how a stranger had gotten these intimate details or whether it was all just a wild coincidence. 

Nowicki’s ex, the titular Cat Person, was not innocent but in a way he was a victim, too. Although Nowicki says details of their meeting and her workplace at the time were taken from her life, she characterizes the relationship as a positive and pleasant one, and that the ex was a good person overall. The Robert character in “Cat Person” is uncomfortably familiar to many women. Most of us have met someone like that. A lot of us have been in Margot’s situation. Knowing that he inspired a character that evoked such a visceral repulsed reaction in women readers could not have been an enjoyable circumstance for him.

With Bad Art Friend and Cat Person, the denizens of the internet pick a champion to support. Larson shouldn’t have plagiarized Dorland, or Dorland shouldn’t have undertaken a harassment campaign against Larson. Roupenian shouldn’t have borrowed details from Nowicki’s life, or Cat Person himself shouldn’t have shared those details with Roupenian and then gaslit Nowicki about it for years.

The fact of fiction is, everything you read comes from an experience a writer has had or heard about. It’s either changed, blended, and anonymized enough that no one will ever know whence it came, or it’s not. Nothing comes from nowhere.

The “Attack Helicopter” situation similarly tackles the artistic question of who is allowed to tell a story: Clarkesworld published “Attack Helicopter” before Isabel Fall came out publicly as transgender; she was still living under another name. With no personal information about Fall available on the internet, readers whipped up a whole frenzy about the author. Was “Isabel Fall” a pen name for a cisgender person making fun of transgender folks? Some folks (trans and cis) felt strongly that “Attack Helicopter” couldn’t possibly have come from an authentic transgender voice. 

Who, Twitter asks, is trans enough to reappropriate the attack helicopter meme and neutralize or redirect its power to harm? Further, who certifies that agreed-upon level of transness for such an endeavor? Who owns an experience? And who owns the right to make fiction from it?

With “Cat Person” and “The Kindest,” the raging argument is about who is entitled to include details from someone’s experience in a work of fiction and to what extent, and whether the person whose details are being borrowed is owed the courtesy of a heads up (or more; I read that Dorland wants to be credited as a coauthor of “The Kindest”). With “Attack Helicopter,” the argument gets into the guts of whether the readership accepts Fall’s fictionalization of her own experience as a transgender person. 

It’s interesting that cisgender people were quick to jump in and condemn “Attack Helicopter” on behalf of the transgender community, presuming the author to be one of our own (a cisgender person) out to do harm. On one hand, it is the responsibility of any mainstream, dominant, or majority population to regulate our own like this; that is, it is not the responsibility of a marginalized population or individual to battle the bad behaviors of the dominant population or its members. The onus is on us. 

On the other hand, at what point does performative allyship overtake meaningful support? At what point do you lose sight of why you’re donating your kidney? Or did you ever have a good reason in sight?

I don’t have any good answers today, only a lot of questions. In any case, I hope I have satisfactorily caught you up on 2021 in literary controversies. I hope you will read “Cat Person” and “Attack Helicopter” because they are both incredible stories. A cool thing about short stories is how when you’re too tired or depressed or busy to read a novel, or your attention span is too short, they’re there for you to read—sometimes even for free on the internet.

If even something as repugnant as the internet can have a redeeming quality, so can we all.

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