Culture

Junk Explained: What Is The ‘Kidney Friend’ Story That Everyone Is Talking About?

The sprawling New York Times story digs into some very thorny issues - and it has a lot of people very riled up.

by Joseph Earp  6 October 2021
new york times kidney story

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Imagine this: you’ve just donated a kidney, an apparently selfless act (more on that “apparently” later) designed to help a stranger in need. Perhaps naturally, you tell people about it. You celebrate a kidney-versary with the recipient of your organ. You post about it in groups.

Then, some time later, you discover that not only has your act been widely mocked by people you considered friends, but that one of these “friends” has written a short story about your good deed. And it doesn’t make you look good.

That’s the situation that Dawn Dorland, a writing teacher from the States, found herself in, as detailed in a fascinating — and very long — New York Times story titled ‘Who Is The Bad Art Friend?’. The story, which deserves to be read in full, is focused on the feud between Dorland and the writer who turned her life into art, Sonya Larson, a spat that ended up before the courts.

Given its length and its admirable nuance, there’s a lot to be dug into with ‘Who Is The Bad Art Friend?’. So let’s take it slow.

Ready?

Please Explain The Entire Dorland vs. Larson Spat In As Few Words As Possible

Sure. Dorland donates a kidney. She writes a letter to the unknown-to-her recipient of the kidney, and then posts it in a writer’s group she’s part of. She notices that Larson, who is a member of the group, hasn’t responded to any of Dorland’s posts about the donation. So she emails Larson to remind her, and Larson responds enthusiastically, congratulating Dorland on the donation. Later, Dorland discovers that Larson has written a story about someone who donates a kidney.

The story, titled ‘The Kindest’, is about a “white, wealthy, entitled” woman who seemingly does the selfless thing of giving away a kidney, only for the reader to realise that the true motivations for the donation are “intense, unbridled narcissism.”

And there, early in the story, is a moment in which the “white, wealthy, entitled” woman writes a letter to the recipient of the kidney, precisely as Dorland did. Moreover, in an early version of ‘The Kindest’, posted to Audible, the letter in the story is almost word-for-word the same as Dorland’s letter.

How Did Dorland Take Her Kidney Donation Being Written About?

Very badly. She hired a lawyer, tried to stop the distribution of ‘The Kindest’, and emailed the people in charge of the writer’s group where she first posted the letter.

How Did Larson Respond?

Larson, who is a woman of colour, initially tried to form a fragile truce with Dorland. When that didn’t work, she accused Dorland of “demand[ing] explicit identification in — and credit for — a writer of colour’s work.” Then, she counter-sued Dorland, claiming defamation.

What Happened With The Writer’s Group?

Well. As it turned out, Larson and a number of members of the writer’s group had been writing about Dorland behind her back, mocking her decision to donate her kidney and then attempt to generate moral praise for her actions.

“The whole thing — though I try to ignore it — persists in making me uncomfortable. … I just can’t help but think that she is feeding off the whole thing,” wrote one member of the group.

Okay, So Who Is The Bad Art Friend?

That’s the thing: the title of the story is deliberately ambiguous. Though on the face of it, Dawn Dorland is the injured party — she’s the one who was mocked for selflessly giving away part of her body, after all — the story is filled with details that make it clear that Dorland did want to gain something from the donation. As those in the writer’s group noted, she turned the act into an extremely public narrative.

And then there’s the fact that she kept track of those writers who responded to her posts about the donation, and explicitly emailed those who didn’t in order to dig for praise.

At best, that’s strange. At worst, that’s — in the words of Larson — entitled.

Wait, Isn’t A Good Deed Still A Good Deed Even If You Want To Gain Something From It?

Okay, so here’s one of the fun parts. A New Yorker writer named Larissa MacFarquhar wrote an incredible book called Strangers Drowning, a philosophical investigation of people that MacFarquhar calls “moral saints.” According to MacFarquhar, a moral saint is someone who does good for others even when it makes their own lives worse. And MacFarquhar says that we tend to hate these people. We find them irritating do-gooders, who make us reflect on our own moral inaction in unpleasant ways.

By MacFarquhar’s definition, Dorland is definitely not a moral saint. Donating the kidney didn’t make her life worse — in fact, she tried to use it to make her life better. She utilised it as a way to be seen as a good person; to generate kudos.

So that’s the interesting thing — we hate moral saints, but we also hate people who try to gain something from good moral action. It seems like we cringe away from any openly moral behaviour, perhaps because in either case, it makes us reflect on ourselves in ways that we don’t entirely abide with.

You Didn’t Answer My Question.

Well, for my money, a good deed is a good deed. Intent is impossible to ever fully know; other minds are a constant mystery to us; people do things for reasons they don’t understand and can’t verbalise. All we can go off is behaviour. Trying to untangle the cause of that behaviour strikes me as irrelevant.

This is essentially a version of the central tenet of the philosophical school of thought known as “consequentialism”, a rule-based way of living that is designed to maximise the good. According to consequentialists, the only thing that matters is increasing “the good” (whatever you decide that to be: happiness, pleasure, etc.) and decreasing “the bad” (pain, sadness, etc.)

So for consequentialists, what Dorland did was good because it maximised the good, and the fact that she stood to gain her own pleasure from it means nothing at all.

So Is It Okay To Write About People Without Getting Their Explicit Permission?

Larson sure thinks so. “If I walk past my neighbour and he’s planting petunias in the garden, and I think, ‘Oh, it would be really interesting to include a character in my story who is planting petunias in the garden,’ do I have to go inform him because he’s my neighbour, especially if I’m still trying to figure out what it is I want to say in the story?'” Larson says in the piece. “I just couldn’t disagree more.”

There’s a precedent to this kind of thing, of course. Remember Cat Person, that short story that went mega-viral too? As it turned out, that story was ripped from someone’s actual life. And memoirists like Eve Babitz, Anaïs Nin, and Joan Didion have been turning their romantic and interpersonal relationships into art for a long time. Indeed, Didion once said of her life with her husband John Gregory Dunne, also a writer: “we agreed that nothing was off the table. Everything could be art.”

Of course, that’s a different kind of situation — both Dunne and Didion agreed to be written about. As to how ethical it is to violate someone’s consent — to take their life from them and not tell them about it — consequentialists have something to say. If the art makes enough people happy, then that happiness outweighs the pain of the person whose consent was violated, and is therefore a good action.

That’s not going to sway someone like Dorland. But hey, wouldn’t it be worse if someone stole from your life and then turned it into really shitty art? If you’re going to turn me into a monster, at least write something good while you’re at it.

Joseph Earp is a staff writer at Junkee and philosopher. He tweets @JosephOEarp. You can read his philosophy column, Overthinking It, here.