Show notes
The question of the bad art friend keeps reemerging, under new auspices and nomenclature — most recently, last week, thanks to a transfixing investigation by Robert Kolker in the New York Times Magazine, which plumbed the sordid depths of a long-running legal conflict between writers Dawn Dorland and Sonya Larson. The site of the battle is an acclaimed work of short fiction by Larson; the grievance is that, Dorland argues, Larson not only based the story on Dorland’s own experience of making an open-ended kidney donation, but plagiarized the letter she wrote to the anonymous recipient of her organ.
It’s a messy saga. If you haven’t read the Kolker piece, maybe you’d like to do so. If not, we do recap in more detail in this week’s episode. It raises a number of juicy questions we couldn’t resist trying to unpack: friendship as mutual surveillance (especially on social media), the ethics of one-sided friendship, what qualifies as plagiarism, what makes for a good work of fiction and, of course, whether and how it’s okay to turn a real person into a fictional character.
When you lay it out so bluntly — “whether it’s okay to turn a real person into a fictional character” — it almost seems ludicrous to me. Of course it’s okay. What other materials do authors have to work with? The question keeps recurring because it’s inevitable that writers will draw from real people they know, real experiences they’ve heard about or had that involve other people, and it’s also inevitable that those people will sometimes recognize themselves and feel confused, uncomfortable, even violated. It’s hard to imagine a set of ethical guidelines that would allow for reasonable artistic freedom but also prevent anyone from ever feeling hurt after reading a story by a friend that seems to have cribbed from their own personal life. In Dorland’s case, for example, she is hurt as soon as she discovers that Larson has written a story about kidney donation without asking or consulting with her — but can we really expect writers to ask permission to write a story about kidney donation simply because they know someone who donated a kidney?
All stories are cobbled together from some combination of the real and the imagined, if only because the real is the language through which they’re told. We all need to recognize what’s on the page enough to grab hold of it — we need to know what the objects are, the kinds of people, the emotions, the behaviors, from seeing something akin to them in our own life. Some stories, like autofiction and memoir, contain far more direct mining from life, but even memoir, technically nonfiction, relies on imaginative work to link together fragmented memories, hazy moments, and transform them into a story. So which parts are real and which are imagined? The mixture is different in each work, and as hard as we try to pin down the exact line between them, we never really can.
In a fantastic episode of “On the Media” (I’m biased because we were in it, but it’s great), Xandra Ellin examines how this exact storytelling dynamic plays out in reality TV: we know that the people are real, and we’re told that their personas and interactions are unscripted and authentic as well. But we also know that what we see is heavily edited, often prompted if not actually scripted, and likely misleading. We know that what we’re watching is both true and not true, and we have to hold both of those realities as we watch the story unfold. We have to accept that the real and the constructed exist side-by-side, in a Schrodinger’s box of narrative, because we can’t know which parts of what we’re seeing to believe.
Or we should! Because more often, we accept what we’re shown and attach TV narratives to real people without much reflection, and even inflict real harassment on them based on an edited storyline. But I love how Ellin approaches the ambiguity of the reality in reality TV, and I think that might be the best model for how we could all approach narratives on the page and on screen: it’s real and it’s made up, it’s impossible to know which part is which, and we should be gentle with any real humans involved.
And to that last point, here’s something we discuss in more detail in the podcast: a short story should not be a “takedown” of a real, normal person you know. It’s not good for the art, and it’s not kind. Some confusion over fiction and reality is unavoidable, but do artists have some ethical responsibility not to use “it’s fiction” as a fig leaf for propagating a harmful narrative about a real, identifiable person? We’d say yes. -Claire
Episode Reading:
Robert Kolker, “Who Is the Bad Art Friend?”
Michael Hobbes, “Identifying the Bad Art Friend Is Easy”
Alexis Nowicki, “Cat Person and Me”
Katy Waldman, “Who Owns a Story?”
Katy Waldman, “The Short Story at the Center of the Bad Art Friend Saga”
ShareWe’ve been watching…
Hulu’s “High Fidelity,” belatedly. It’s hard because I’m absolutely driven to distraction by how perfect Zoë Kravitz’s cheekbones are, but I think I’m getting the main gist of the storyline, which is about breakups? Breakups are hard to do? -Claire
I finally started “Squid Game,” and turns out that apparently the most popular Netflix show of all time is in fact good. lol. -Emma
We’ve been reading…
Claire sent me the latest Ask Polly, and it really hit me deeply. It’s been a weird transition time for our careers, and it felt like sweet relief to see Heather Havrilesky’s words: “As dorky as it sometimes feels, we deserve to take ourselves and our work seriously… And it’s hard to savor the work itself when you keep telling yourself that everything you do is stupid and empty. Pay attention to the FEELING that your work is empty, because it will show you what you’d prefer to cover instead, but lose the STORY that everything you’ve made until now is worthless.” -Emma
I got the new Jonathan Franzen novel, “Crossroads,” which is approximately the shape and weight of a Bible, and also, aptly, set amidst the dramas of a progressive church youth group in 1971. So far, about two-thirds of the way through, it’s annoying me less than “Purity” and “Freedom,” which is to say that I’m unable to put it down. His fascination with American idealists and fanatics is beautifully explored and his characters are resolutely flawed, teeming masses of human contradiction. -Claire
We’ve been listening to…
“The Bravo Docket,” a podcast where two attorneys break down Bravo legal drama. (I’ve been especially into the episodes about Jen Shah and Erika Girardi.) -Emma
We’ve been buying…
I’ve been lusting after these Horsebit Lug Sole Gucci loafers. I cannot come close to affording those, so these Zara ones felt like a budget-friendly option for a similar vibe. -Emma
Thanks to everyone who sent me children’s clothing recs! I got my son some very charming leggings and tees from Primary, which he immediately tried to put on himself. -Claire
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