The Sunday Read: ‘Who Is the Bad Art Friend?’

The Daily

The New York Times

Daily News, News

4.4 • 102.8K Ratings

🗓️ 24 October 2021

⏱️ 68 minutes

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Summary

On June 24, 2015, Dawn Dorland, an essayist and aspiring novelist, did perhaps the kindest, most consequential thing she might ever do in her life. She donated one of her kidneys — and elected to do it in a slightly unusual and particularly altruistic way. As a so-called nondirected donation, her kidney was not meant for anyone in particular, but for a recipient who may otherwise have no other living donor. Several weeks before the surgery, Ms. Dorland decided to share her truth with others. She started a private Facebook group, inviting family and friends, including some fellow writers from GrubStreet, the Boston writing center where she had spent many years learning her craft. After her surgery, she posted something to her group: a heartfelt letter she’d written to the final recipient of the surgical chain, whoever they may be. Ms. Dorland noticed some people she’d invited into the group hadn’t seemed to react to any of her posts. On July 20, she wrote an email to one of them: a writer named Sonya Larson. A year later, Ms. Dorland learned that Ms. Larson had written a story about a woman who received a kidney. Ms. Larson told Ms. Dorland that it was “partially inspired” by how her imagination took off after learning of Ms. Dorland’s donation. Art often draws inspiration from life — but what happens when it’s your life?

Transcript

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0:00.0	In early January I got an email out of the blue from a writer named Don Doerland, who
0:14.3	I'd never met before and didn't know.
0:17.7	The email said that she was involved in a dispute with another writer named Sonya Larson
0:22.5	and that she felt she'd been plagiarized.
0:25.3	She thought it might be a topic that I might want to explore.
0:29.6	I have to say that to be approached this way from somebody who's in the middle of a dispute
0:34.0	is not exactly unusual for me because I write a lot about tangled disputes.
0:40.0	On the other hand it's possible that I was the 17th door that Don knocked on.
0:45.8	My name is Robert Kulker and I'm the writer of Who Is The Bad Art Friend, which appeared
0:50.6	recently in the New York Times magazine.
0:55.4	Without giving away too much of the story, one side of the dispute felt that an aspect
0:59.4	of her life was sort of being kidnapped by someone else and put into someone else's
1:03.2	fiction.
1:04.7	But on the other side, the other writer felt harassed that the first writer was being
1:09.4	irrational and was set out to destroy her for what she thought was something that artists
1:14.2	do all the time.
1:16.4	What interested me the most was that the disagreement between the two writers was something that started
1:21.0	out very small and then got bigger and bigger very gradually until it finally landed in
1:26.1	federal court in a defamation and copyright infringement case where the two people involved
1:31.4	could really easily be affected for the rest of their lives by this disagreement.
1:36.0	I had to ask myself, how did it get this bad?
1:39.7	Where did it go wrong?
	...

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