I don’t know who’s ultimately responsible for this one, but they definitely threw Kristen Roupenian to the sharks here. You’ll notice I linked to several other reviewers and more or less agree with most of what each of them says. For me, I agree with Lydia Kiesling that even the best story in this book, the now famous “Cat Person” has a glaring weakness at its very heart that is also unfortunately what made so many people want to read it. That Robert sends that final text screams to me “LOOK! SEE!” in a way that I think fundamentally dismantles a lot of the interesting things the story did to that point. It also let the protagonist entirely off the (her own) hook. And I think it showed that a lot of people didn’t want to read a short story, so much as wanted to be told a satisfying story that left them at the end exactly where they were at the beginning.
Other stories have the same issue: a lot of tension built upon good narration, slow character-building and then a cheap ending. The same basic thing happens in the story “The Good Guy” which ends with a bad guy yelling about how much a good guy he is.
The one story I think that was actually best of the bunch is called “The Boy in the Pool” where a bachelorette party manages to track down a b-list actor who played the engaged woman’s Skinemaxesque crush when they were in middle school. It’s the one that best subverts expectations, instead of just handing them over.
I would argue that every other story beyond those three tend to be forgettable, or annoyingly and falsely “shocking” in their set up and execution.
There’s not a compelling reason this book should have been published. “Cat Person” should have ushered in a new voice, and it did, but it did so in order to quickly capitalize on very unexpected fame and virality. The result is a book that was never allowed to rise. I have to imagine that had Kristen Roupenian had a shelved novel somewhere, we’d be reading that instead, and the results would likely have been the same.
Some additional reviews:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/the-author-of-cat-person-has-more-stories-to-tell-can-they-live-up-to-the-hype/2019/01/11/2cf7296e-15c6-11e9-803c-4ef28312c8b9_story.html
https://www.thecut.com/2019/01/review-you-know-you-want-this-by-kristen-roupenian.html
https://theoutline.com/post/6982/kristen-roupenian-cat-person-book-review-you-know-you-want-this?zd=1&zi=gdunh3sa
(Photo: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/You-Know-You-Want-This/Kristen-Roupenian/9781982101633)
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