“Any similarity to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events, is purely coincidental” is a sentence we often read in the opening credits of film or TV series, or in the prologues of books. Its origins go back to a 1934 U.S. film, Rasputin and the Empress, whose historical inaccurate portrayal resulted in a lawsuit filed against Metro-Goldwin-Mayer film producers by Irina Yusupov (wife of the man who killed Rasputin) for invasion of privacy and libel, who won and was awarded a hefty compensation.

But this sentence reminds us we should distrust what we see or read in fiction products and that reality and fiction are two separate spheres. And yet, sometimes, the situation is somewhat different.

The piece of news is fresh, dating back to a few days ago: Alexis Nowicki is the real protagonist of Cat Person, the multi award-winning short story (which quickly went viral online) by Kristen Roupenian, first published in The New Yorker in 2017.

Alexis Nowicki published an essay in Slate magazine, alleging that the story of Margot and Robert written by Roupenian is actually very similar to that of her and Charles and summing up the relationship she had while studying at Michigan university. She and Charles met at a restaurant in a shopping mall, the same venue described in Cat Person, where they talked about climate change and exchanged phone numbers. On their first date they went to the cinema to see The Great Gatsby and they listened to Beach House in the car. She asked him how old he was and he answered, hesitantly, “33”. She was 18 and thought: “I feel emancipated considering that I managed to attract a grown-up man”. They both moved to university, where he was a researcher and she was a student, and they actually did date each other, they adopted two cats and declared their love to each other. Then they broke up, she graduated and relocated to New York.

In 2017, Alexis Nowicki read the story because her friends, who knew about her affair, sent it to her, asking whether she had written it herself, changing her name. She immediately recognised herself in that character. Sure, it featured scenes she had not experienced, but certain details, such as her job, the city, the physical looks of the man, his home and his tattoo on the left shoulder were all identical. “Could it be a wild coincidence? Or did Roupenian, a person I’d never met, somehow know about me?”, Nowicki wrote in the article.

Nowicki therefore sent Roupenian an email, asking her to explain, and the author confirmed she had gone on a date with Charles and found out about their affair through the social media, so she reconstructed some events while inventing others. In the meantime, the New Yorker had received everything: her affair, the places they visited together, their cats and a standpoint of the affair that Nowicki thought could be more clear-headed than hers.

The potential moral of this story is that it is only natural to search for ourselves in every story we read: the stories and affairs that work are the ones we can all identify ourselves in. Plus, novels quite often feature some autobiographic elements – both of the author and of the readers. But we must learn to separate the two things, following Nowicki’s example: she still has an idea of Charles that greatly differs from Robert.