My Kidney for Your Approval

Which virtues? Whose signals?

In June 2015, Dawn Dorland donated a kidney “altruistically”—to whoever needed it most, to someone she didn’t know at all. Before the donation, she made a Facebook group about it and invited people to join, including Sonya Larson, someone she knew from a writers’ group. The group didn’t work out as Dorland intended; the reader gets the impression that people weren’t praising her for her donation as much as she would have liked. She sent Larson an email which included the phrase: “I think you’re aware that I donated my kidney this summer. Right?” The article sees Dorland remembering that she wondered things like: “If she [Larson] really thought it was that great, why did she need reminding that it happened?” And: “Do writers not care about my kidney donation?”

Dorland was looking for attention for her good deed, and she got it, but not the kind of attention she wanted. Larson texted with friends about how narcissistic Dorland’s behavior was. They wrote messages like “I’m now following Dawn Dorland’s kidney posts with creepy fascination” and “A hashtag seems to me like a cry for attention.” Larson wrote replies like “I just can’t help but think that she is feeding off the whole thing” and “Like, what am I supposed to do? DONATE MY ORGANS??”. Larson ended up writing a modestly successful short story, “The Kindest,” about an organ donor desperate for friendship and approval from the recipient of her donation. She took some text in that story almost verbatim from a letter Dorland had written about her donation, writing to a friend, “I’ve tried to change it but I can’t seem to—that letter was just too damn good.” In an early draft, she named the donor character Dawn. “The first draft,” a friend wrote, “really was a takedown of Dawn, wasn’t it?” Larson wrote to another: “Dude, I could write pages and pages more about Dawn. … The woman is a gold mine!”

As facts came to light, Dorland hired an attorney who sent a cease-and-desist letter to a Boston book festival that had started distributing "The Kindest," alleging copyright violation. (The festival eventually dropped the story.) Larson's attorneys responded with accusations of harassment and defamation. After some legal back-and-forth, Larson filed a defamation lawsuit in January 2019, and Dorland filed a counterclaim for copyright violation and infliction of emotional distress in April 2020.

The real-life situation, to Larson, had become like the didactic structure of her story. Her website reads: “Hi. I wrote ‘The Kindest.’ To learn how this story functions racially, watch this video below. To learn more about racism faced by Asian-Americans, watch this video. To learn more about alcoholism and addictive thinking, watch this video. These are things I was thinking about when writing this short story. – Sonya.” I don’t know what it means for something to “function racially,” but Larson’s quotes, and those of her friend, Celeste Ng, author of the highly lucrative novel Little Fires Everywhere, return to this theme frequently both in interpreting Larson’s story and in interpreting Dorland’s reaction: they’re about “racial dynamics,” they’re “racially coded.” Dorland and Rose, the donor from the story, both wanted to be “white saviors.” Chuntao, the narrator of Larson’s story and clearly her authorial stand-in, “resisted,” according to Larson, and in the Times’s words “refused to become subsumed by Rose’s narrative.” Larson says: “Small acts of refusal like that are things that people of color—and writers of color—in this country have to bravely do all the time.”

But Dorland and Rose were both, in fact, saviors. It wasn’t just a narrative: They both did, in fact, donate organs to people in need, to little advantage of their own. Meanwhile…

We hope you enjoyed this excerpt. To read the full essay, and to gain full access to Arc Digital, become a member at $8 per month or $80 for the year.