Literary Clusterfucks 2013

“We tortured some folks”

I haven't been around much but this story just gets more infuriating; as someone with roughly as much claim on being nonwhite as Larson, I think the racial angle in this is horseshit but also no one seems to be really addressing it

like, there's a lot of emphasis on "she can't be a white savior, she didn't know the race of the recipient" but that's not what Larson is saying -- she's saying that white people tend to latch onto people of color and assume they are better friends than they are, and that that's what was happening here. and yeah, in general, this happens. however:

1) Larson was actively presenting herself as a friend, and kind of effusively too! if someone emails you with stuff like "I think so highly of you, and yet you say you're not feeling it. I have always encouraged you as a writer and a person, and I would not stop now, or ever," it seems like a reasonable assumption that that person is at least on good terms with you?
2) it's not like she just communicates this way with people of color -- there's a very charming email from Chip "#PublishingPaidMe an $800k advance" Cheek in which he is shocked, shocked! that Dawn was really friendly to him when she moved to LA. this just seems like the kind of person she is, in general, to everyone.
3) there are other things that can make someone unaware of social cues, such as childhood trauma -- you know, the thing mentioned literally at the start of the article
4) that whole gross "don't worry, you can always recruit PoC as your personal army to draaaaaag her" thing

there's also a "only white people are saying this" narrative which can be disproven in like 5 seconds of looking. it's actually kind of weird how the sides are shaking out, on dorland's side you have a bunch of seemingly ok people and also j*sse s*ngal

LOL her background image pic.twitter.com/EwonpTjiJv

— Cersei was right (@MoviePrograms) October 12, 2021

meanwhile

you guys have me going back and forth about who the worst person is in the bad art friend story so i’ve decided to just try to see myself in both of them and turn my loathing inward which is also a form of narcissism from this particular circle of hell there is no way out

— eve 6ix (@Eve6) October 12, 2021

That is what i said earlier though

Plagiarism imo

J*sse s*ngal's angle seems to be "they both look white to me", which, respect for finding a terrible take after everyone else thought there was just bones left.

Still waiting for the "Women would rather give away their organs than date incels" take

I think "we all have texts between friends that are obnoxious about people who are getting on our nerves, like Sonya Larson" is true in a way that "we all have work emails where we grunt about who's a f****t and a p***y, like John Gruden" is not

1) Larson was actively presenting herself as a friend, and kind of effusively too! if someone emails you with stuff like "I think so highly of you, and yet you say you're not feeling it. I have always encouraged you as a writer and a person, and I would not stop now, or ever," it seems like a reasonable assumption that that person is at least on good terms with you?

it is the way somebody who is not your friend but wants to remain at least on good terms with you writes. the formality is way over the top for an actual friend. right? or maybe I just have very casually-writing friends but none of them would ever say or write to me "I have always encouraged you as a person"

these people seem weirdly obsessed with appearing to be "kind" and "warm" in that way

i keep reading their quotes and tweets in the voice of the art teacher from daria

omg do you think they actually DO talk to their real-life friends that way? Yeah maybe so, the "that could never be you because of your superhuman self-awareness!" line mentioned earlier does kinda suggest that. lordy, what a discourse community

I also think "plagiarism" is a big stretch here -- if I saw a weird sign outside a church and wrote a story that had a church that had that sign it wouldn't be plagiarism. I suppose the argument is that it's different because Dorland is herself a capital-W Writer. At the very least it's just not nice to put someone's words in the mouth of a character you're casting in a cold light (in the same way it wouldn't be nice to the church and you'd just have to hope whoever put up that sign didn't read American Story Monthly.) Anyway I cannot quite fathom the idea that Larson wrote the story *as an attack on Dorland*, I think the encounter with Dorland gave Larson the idea for a story about a character who based on that New Yorker review is very obviously not Dorland and not based on Dorland.

Except that character was named 'Dawn' in an early draft - which then got changed to 'Rose Rothario', which has exactly the same alliterative pattern as 'Dawn Dorland'.

"rose rothario" also so goddamn hilarious

Her friends call her RoRo.

it's truly the todd bonzalez of literary fiction

I've definitely used comments from videos and internet forums (never ILX, i wouldn't do that) in my written work.

It's pretty common practice tbh, there's a whole poetic school based off of this sort of thing lol

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flarf_poetry

ha, "it was just flarf don't you see" would be a hilarious new line of Sonya Larson defense

bad flarf friend

lol i agree tbh

it's truly the todd bonzalez of literary fiction

actual lol.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flarf_poetry

― I'm a sovereign jazz citizen (the table is the table), Tuesday, October 12, 2021 2:16 PM (yesterday)

lol, I actually did a thing (undocumented iirc) that was inspired by K.S.M.'s deer head piece

I know everyone's probably sick of this by now but this doc seems like the final nail in the coffin of "why would she ever think we were friends"

fwiw here is Dorland's description of her relationship with Larson (screenshots 1-2; pgs 23-24 here: https://t.co/4IgCbqCRvL)

screenshot 3 shows Larson's attorney's statement about their relationship (pg 8 here: https://t.co/mlv7NFLIKb)

(thank you tipster!) pic.twitter.com/Mr9S2t1wPi

— kidneygate (@kidneygate) October 13, 2021

Agreed -- if that's the best Dorland can come up with to attest to their close friendship it kind of sounds pretty much like "people who moved in the same social group." Like, if one of your data points in favor of "we were really close" is "she knew about my difficult childhood once she read the essay I published about it"...

I mean, that's just a few pages, maybe there's more to it, I don't know, but I can't think of somebody I'd call "a true friend" who I've never hung out with one to one, certainly including people whose birthday parties I've been to.

Or I dunno, maybe those are people I'd call "friend" in the sense of "my friend from work said" but ... is that what we're talking about here?

I meant it in the opposite way, this is not the behavior of someone who says "we have not and have never been friends"

And I guess it seems to me like exactly the behavior of someone who would say about you "we're friendly but we're not FRIEND friends"

But I don't want to overinterpret, I recognize this is not Dorland speaking for herself but her attorney trying to strategically accomplish something on her behalf.

I'm not sure why it matters if they were bffs or passing acquaintances

I'm not sure either but it seems to be an issue before the court for some reason

it doesn't matter for the legal plagiarism sense but it sure matters for the "how could she possibly think we were friends, I gave her no reason to think that, therefore she is the worst and anything that happens to her is justified" narrative

it just seems to me that if someone invites you to their birthday party, their partner's mom's funeral, shows up at your farewell party, etc., it is not a crazy stalker act to think you're friends? which is how it's being characterized

sorry, I meant more in terms of "the depth/shallowness of their friendship doesn't make Larson et al any less shitty"

ah apologies

no need, I was unintentionally ambiguous there

i mean, i understand where yr coming from Katherine, but I think that the cliquish nature of literary communities is often as such that one might go to the birthday of someone they don't care for if it means they will be "circulating," perhaps with people that they actually do care for— in many ways, literary communities (esp. those that are more mainstream and identified with establishment values, ie most non-profits like Grub Street) are more like regular workplaces than a lot of people would care to admit.

there's a long thing i could write about how the MFA industry and fake "professionalization" of literary arts culture is showing its ugliness at the max in this case, but you get the picture.

in any case, as my friend hinted at, i think that Dorland and Larson could come away from these interactions with vastly different ideas of one another and how close they might be, given the way that these communities work.

Larson was nasty and petty about it in a way that Dorland was not, this is true, and that's unfortunate.

This is all making me see Dorland's email to Larson about the Facebook group in a slightly different light. Semi-dormant friendships, the kind that start out in person and then shift to Facebook and email when people move away, can be hard to read sometimes. It can be hard to know if someone is just bad at staying in touch or if they've mentally dropped you from their list of people they keep in contact with. If the group was Dorland's way of trying to stay in touch with people she considered good friends, then I could see her sending that email as a feeler to find out if Larson was ghosting her.

I am not Team Larson — I see a lot of bad behavior by all parties — but Dorland's position in the group seems pretty clear. She was part of it, but in the way many circles of friends include people whom not everyone (or even anyone) likes all that much. People can end up as part of a group and still be generally thought of as "The Annoying One." Nothing in those various social media exchanges contradicts that, you can reply in a friendly way to somebody on Facebook who you don't really like. And Dorland insisting "No we were friends" in light of all the other evidence out there just feels kind of sad and needy and ... Dorland-ish.

if i didn't want to make someone think i was a genuine friend to them i simply wouldn't give them a thoughtful and personal going away gift which i put together myself with many personal touches and references to our shared history

but that's just how amazing of a person sonia is man. she does that even for people she doesn't like. just think what kinds of presents her real friends get!

Haven’t read this thread in a while...

“what i am saying is, deep down, there is one of the two you despise more than the other.

― treeship., Sunday, October 10, 2021”

The story is so convoluted though and they both seem awful, as does Robert Kolker

Don’t know why I wasted my time thinking about this

Kolker's story has a lot invested in the "dilemma: which of these two people are the worst?" angle, which is essentially why it went viral. But if you read beyond that, it's pretty clear that it's actually a question of a relatively successful writer and her writer pals punching down on an admittedly annoying and needy less successful writer who can't quite crack the codes to join the clique.

Not gonna lie, the “never been alone in a room together” seems to be such a specific claim as to give the game away

May as well add “yes, we’ve had many meals at restaurants together, yes we’ve gone out for drinks or coffee multiple times, yes we’ve been to each others’ homes in both small and large gatherings”

The whole thing reads to me like an upper middle class horror story—What if the socially inept peers you treat like garbage somehow were able to turn the tables on you? While still be

This pig needs to keep an eye on its friends.

Pig kidney attached to human body in transplant experiment https://t.co/QmCexj5vYb

— WBIR Channel 10 (@wbir) October 20, 2021

https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/books/story/2021-11-30/alice-sebold-apologizes-anthony-broadwater-rape-conviction
"Alice Sebold’s memoir, ‘Lucky,’ pulled as she apologizes to man wrongly convicted of her rape"