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…
