When Kristen Roupenian’s short story “Cat Person” became a viral sensation in 2017 and the second-most-read article the New Yorker published that year, Roupenian seemed poised to step into a literary role pioneered by Mary McCarthy: the author of slightly shocking, painfully honest, highly relatable short fiction about the sexual and romantic lives of contemporary young women. McCarthy’s story “The Man in the Brooks Brothers Suit,” published in the Partisan Review in 1941, thrilled and scandalized a generation of readers by depicting a brainy, McCarthy-esque character who meets an older businessman on a train; she starts out condescending to him then ends up having a drunken, ambivalent one-night-stand with him. (George Plimpton, who was a teenager at the time, recalled that at Exeter, the story “made almost as much an impression as Pearl Harbor.”) In 1999, Melissa Bank’s A Girl’s Guide to Hunting and Fishing—a collection of linked stories tracing the romantic evolution of a single character from age 14 to her 30s—spent 17 weeks on the best-seller list because even young women very different from Bank herself felt it spoke directly to their own dilemmas and experiences.
from Stories from Slate http://bit.ly/2LXr5l6
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