Originally Published in Print, December 2021.
Last month, Robert Kolker published an article in the New York Times Magazine. ‘Who is the Bad Art Friend?’ outlined a tangled saga of passive-aggressive email exchanges and a short story plagued by ongoing lawsuits — a saga sparked by the altruistic donation of a kidney. The article, a wild read in its own right, carried echoes of a previous tell-all sensation published in The Cut in 2019. Natalie Beach’s personal essay ‘I Was Caroline Calloway’ detailed how she had ghostwritten the proposal for titular influencer-slash-scammer Calloway’s $500,000 memoir, and described the subsequent dissolution of their friendship.
While the set dressing differs in many respects, both articles are about delusion, writers, social media — and what happens when delusional writers are on social media. Writing, regardless of whether it’s fiction or non-fiction, is inherently (and precariously) personal. Dawn Dorland (the kidney donor) and Caroline Calloway (the would-be memoirist) learned this first-hand. Dorland’s fellow writer and friendly acquaintance Sonya Larson plagiarised Dorland’s Facebook post celebrating the unknown recipient of her kidney for a short story about a white saviour organ donor and an ungrateful Asian-American organ recipient. More objectionably, she also mocked Dorland in emails and Facebook messages to mutual acquaintances (since subpoenaed). Beach, meanwhile, presented a version of Calloway in her article that Calloway strongly objected to. The ethicality of what Beach and Larson wrote is open for debate — and has been debated, ad nauseum, on Twitter. At any rate, Dorland is now hounding Larson via a series of lawsuits, and Calloway frequently makes bitchy comments about Beach on Instagram, so the moral scales have more or less balanced out.
The most interesting part of all this is the extent to which these individuals lack self-awareness. Dorland struggles to comprehend the fact that, post-organ-donation, she won’t get a pat on the back from everyone she meets for the rest of her life. After attending a writer’s conference, she recalls being bewildered that more people hadn’t explicitly congratulated her on her altruism: “I left that conference with this question: Do writers not care about my kidney donation? Which kind of confused me, because I thought I was in a community of service-orientated people.” Meanwhile, in Calloway’s essay response to Beach’s article (the aptly named ‘I Am Caroline Calloway’), she laments that “real ingenues [sic] are either born fluent in extreme wealth or arrived at such a fluency from abject poverty by means that were unplanned. Like marrying rich by accident or being model-scouted at the local mall. Middle-class and upper-middle class girls like myself were supposed to be grateful we didn’t have it worse.” Boohoo.
Dorland and Calloway both have long-standing writing projects. Dorland has been working on a semi-autobiographical novel for many years, while Calloway continues to promise she will finish her aforementioned $500,000 University of Cambridge memoir. Neither of these projects have been delivered. (In Calloway’s case, this is despite having already accepted money for pre-orders. She is also, at present, selling 30ml bottles of grapeseed oil mixed with essential oils for seventy-plus dollars a pop as her supposed skincare secret. She has named this concoction “Snake Oil”.) Here, talking about writing takes precedence over actual writing. Self-presentation blurs with self-invention; Calloway trips over her own lies and repeatedly promises a book she will never produce, as Dorland waxes lyrical celebrating her organ donation on a private Facebook group she set up for that very purpose. Though to be fair, Dorland and Calloway are not completely comparable. Dorland’s murky intentions do not cancel out her incredibly generous decision to donate her kidney to a stranger, while Calloway sells squiggly Matisse knock-offs for $400 and secondhand books she’s written nonsense in for $40.
Returning to Kolker’s article, some readers concluded that the bad art friend was not Sonya Larson or Dawn Dorland, but Tom Meek — the hapless individual who first informed Dorland that Larson had written a short story about a donated kidney. But a cursory glance through the article’s digital fallout on Twitter revealed a beleaguered Meek anxiously clarifying to anyone who would listen that he had simply thought the similarities between Dorland and the fictional kidney donor a funny coincidence, and deeply regretted his very minor part in the entire incident. Likewise, Beach didn’t escape criticism over her own curated self-presentation in ‘I Was Caroline Calloway’. There are two sides to every story, etcetera, etcetera; but the slipperiness of a story unfolding in real time with real consequences is precisely what makes these articles, and the people (mis)represented in them, so fascinating.
