Literary Intrigue, Artistic Ownership, and (Very) Bad Art Friends

Hello, friends. Today’s post is a bit different, as it is a response to a conversation happening elsewhere at Substack, which led me down the rabbit hole of a story of literary jealousy and intrigue. If you’ve ever had a “bad art friend,” read on…but trust me, you may fall down the rabbit hole too. If you’re just here at The Caffeinated Writer for the craft, you might enjoy reading the series How to Start Writing Your Novel or diving into the What to Write This Week series. But if you’re in the mood for a little Saturday gossip, read on…

You may have seen this post over at Seltzer Rocks by

Sarah Levy

, as it was featured in Substack Reads several weeks ago.

Okay wow. I was living in Paris when this drama unfolded, which is perhaps a bit like living under a rock; melodramas of the ultra-privileged always don’t quite make it across the pond. It’s “bad art friend” and “Gossip Girl” rolled into one. The main characters are C, who gained social media fame in the early days of Instagram, and her friend N, who claimed in a viral article for The Cut in 2019 that she was the one who made C famous by writing the captions to C’s Instagram posts.

Of course I had to follow the link to the piece in The Cut, which reminded me of a smaller, much meaner version of Ann Patchett’s “Truth and Beauty: A Friendship.,” which is partially about jealousy, and which also begins with a friendship between two young writing students. In Patchett’s case, she envies her friend Lucy Grealy’s literary fame following the success of Grealy’s memoir, Autobiography of a Face—a book about Grealy’s aggressive childhood cancer, which caused severe pain and permanent disfigurement. The comparison ends there, however. Though Truth and Beauty touches on jealousy, it elegantly explores many facets of friendship, grief, and love. For Patchett, Grealy was one subject among many in what would become a significant and celebrated body of work. For N, there appears to be only one subject so far: C.

In the piece for The Cut, N makes no secret of the fact that she is eaten up by jealousy because C gets attention from the outside world, attention that N feels she herself deserves, as she considers herself the more literary and serious of the two. N admits that she must tell C’s story because her own story isn’t interesting—though one imagines she might have found the road into telling her own story had she not gotten sidetracked by someone else’s life. But as it turns out, getting sidetracked worked out really well for N, because her stink piece on her former friend apparently netted her a one-million dollar TV deal.

In the article, N alludes to her and C’s writing professor, easily identifiable as David Lipsky—whose book Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself was adapted for the big screen as The End of the Tour, a terrific movie about literary idol-worship and jealousy. According to N, Lipsky told her she was a far better writer than C, a claim that Lipsky later refuted. I mean, dragging your professor into the fight seems like a lot.

Earlier this year, N wrote another piece for The Cut to promote her first book, a brief essay collection. The book contains ten essays, two of which are apparently about the C saga. In the new article for The Cut, N claims that “C and I became the internet’s main characters, and everyone had their own opinion about who we were.” This is a bit of an exaggeration, perhaps. In a cheeky move, C self-published her own bookish item, Scammer (so titled because C scammed a lot of her followers out of a lot of cash by promising exciting, life-changing conferences on which she did not deliver) just a few days before N’s release date. She is charging $65 for the “luxury first edition.” Ultimately, one has to concede that both N and C are very good at marketing themselves, or some version of themselves.

Sarah Levy’s piece and the whole swirly rabbit hole reads like candy, an utterly delightful distraction; then again, as with Bad Art Friend, what is fun to read is often very much not fun to live. (In case you’ve forgotten, Bad Art Friend is a wildly talked-about but ultimately low-stakes drama in which one aspiring writer plagiarizes another aspiring writer and ends up winning a small contest with the plagiarized story, and the plagiarizing writer’s friends, who all teach writing at the same joint in Boston, gang up on the plagiarized writer (a student) in a series of cruel email and text chains straight out of Mean Girls, including but not exclusive to mocking the plagiarized writer for donating a kidney—because apparently donating a kidney is “bad” and plagiarizing is “good” among this crowd—and all of this nastiness is saved for posterity when the plagiarizing writer sues the plagiarized writer for “tortious interference and defamation” and the texts and emails are released through the discovery process.)

Of course, literary feuds are nothing new. For some titillating weekend reading, check out LitHub’s list of 25 Legendary Literary Feuds—many of which begin with friendship and end with acrimony. When celebrated writers focus their energies on taking down another writer, they often use the language of the playground bully. John Irving once said that, on any page of a Tom Wolfe novel, he could “read a sentence that would make me gag.” Norman Mailer worked both misogyny and fat-shaming into an insult of Wolfe, and insult that does not bear repeating.

Of John Updike, Salman Rushdie said, “He should stay in his parochial neighbourhood and write about wife-swapping, because it’s what he can do…” This was in response to a nasty review Updike wrote about Rushdie.

And sometimes a literary feud gets physical, especially if Richard Ford is involved. Ford has been known to behave very badly when another writer publishes a negative review of his book: from shooting a hole in an Alice Hoffman novel and sending the book to her in pieces, to spitting on Colson Whitehead at a literary conference. Whitehead, for his part, chose words as his weapon in response: “I would like to warn the many other people who panned the book that they might want to get a rain poncho, in case of inclement Ford.”

Of course, Ford is no match in macho bad behavior for Proust, who challenged Jean Lorrain to a duel after Lorrain called Proust a dilettante. (No one was hurt).