Member-only story

How the NYT “Kidney Story” Became the Literary Scandal of the Year

On plagiarism and our response to conflicts between writers.

Xi Chen
Physician Writer
6 min readOct 7, 2021

--

Photo by Robina Weermeijer on Unsplash

Writers on Twitter have been captivated—some, outraged—by an article published in The New York Times Magazine this past Tuesday on the drama between two fiction writers, Dawn Dorland and Sonya Larson. The online discourse is paving the way for this complicated conflict to become a major literary scandal, in a year already aflame from the “Cat Person” controversy.

Hopefully, I was not the only one feeling left out when I scanned through my feed and found everybody dismayed and reeling about “the kidney story.” If you haven’t read it, I don’t blame you. The article, written by Robert Kolker, is really long. I encourage everyone to give it a shot though, because the intricacies in the narrative are genuinely compelling, almost like a novel in how it unfolds.

The Story

I’ll try to summarize this juicy story. “Who Is the Bad Art Friend?” begins in 2015, when Dorland donated a kidney to a stranger and created a private Facebook group to spread the news about her act of generosity as well as awareness about the virtues of organ donation. Her advocacy was apparently a big deal, and she became a representative for different causes. Larson was a member of this…

--

--

Physician Writer
Physician Writer

Published in Physician Writer

The Medical Humanities works to recognize the body as a lived-in experience. This publication engages the multifaceted nature of health and illness through essays on art, literature, and philosophy. Interested in being a writer? Email Xi Chen at xrc2@cornell.edu.

Xi Chen
Xi Chen

Written by Xi Chen

I write essays about literary fiction.

Responses (2)