The current Internet-fueled maelstrom ignited by the article “Who Is the Bad Art Friend?”—about two writers and the putative ownership of a “kidney story:” for one writer it was a lived experience; for the other it was something to render in fiction— in all its dizzying permutations, the details of which were further recast in a court case, made me wonder if the corollary, the Good Art Friend, must then also exist.
First, I have to admit I am not sure what an “art friend” is at all. Full disclosure: I am Facebook friends with both protagonists, as well as with the writer of the original piece. I’m also a little unclear how and where the adjective good/bad attaches (to friend? to art?).
Since the definition is up for grabs, I’ve defining BAF as someone who is on the whole deleterious to your art, but probably good to their own, and may or may not be a friend—if we define friend as someone who cares for you, shows up for you, and genuinely shares in your joys. The GAF is the good friend who helps you on your journey, often in ways you don’t expect and don’t appreciate until enough time has passed for hindsight.
For Sale/Kidney Story, Never Authorized was an insightful newsletter post by my erstwhile creative writing colleague Lincoln Michel. The post made me think about how no matter how solitary we are as artists, even Emily Dickinson grabbed the details of life including those of the people closest to her for her work. For me, my oldest art friend, besides my Royal typewriter, is my hometown best friend, Patti. She is my art friend exemplar, even though, as a VP-CFO of an insurance company, people might say, she’s not an artist, which makes me say, how do we define art and is the “artist” solely responsible for—and the benefiter of—its creation?
Patti and I met, admittedly, in the most incredibly catty way, excusable because we were only 10 or 11: piano recitals. I suffered through years of piano lessons, every minute of which I loathed— the opening bars of “Für Elise” will be forever a trigger—plus the added misery of recitals and competitions, all of which took place in the basement of our public library, where I once took a karate class in hopes it would protect me from racist bullies. In our small town we actually had three or more piano teachers, which meant sitting through interminable rounds of little kids picking out “Chopsticks.” In our cohort, I felt Patti was the most talented, but most of the attention went to a boy pianist (whom I won’t even refer to here, for our nickname for him will make him instantly recognizable) whom we felt received unnecessary and excessive praise from our teachers solely for being the rare dude.
We actually didn’t dislike Boy Pianist on a personal level, we just truly felt the adulation he received from our teachers gave short shrift to Patti’s talents. Patti was also being raised by a single dad, a miner, after her mother was killed in a car accident, and unlike me with my Asian Tiger parents and the other kids, she continued to play of her own accord and because of her talent. This was also my first lesson in how you can bond with a fellow artist by being annoyed at a third artist.
Patti was also the person who constantly pushed me to venture into new experiences, like the time before we had driver’s licenses when we tried biking to the next town, which required a short and terrifying stint on the highway. The sense of risk and being able to sit with uncertainty is essential for any art, and I don’t know if I would have developed it on my own. I also secretly thought I was a very humorous person, but without a sparring partner, how to develop those skills? Patti was and still is one of the quickest and funniest people I know. Imagine my delight as a child finally finding someone who shared my passion for MAD magazine. Not to mention that being the only student of color in our high school made me a magnet for bullies, and often I was too tired, too scared, too full of self-loathing to defend myself, but Patti never seemed to tire of defending me.
When I wrote my first novel, a YA story set in high school, a Patti-esque character figured prominently. It was easy to develop a fully realized character basically plagiarizing my colorful friend, including her telling off racist bullies. The novel did end up with race as a prominent theme, but much of my motivation came from feeling the experiences of youth slipping away and wanting to trap them in fiction. In various drafts, the protagonist became more and more fictional: I was an avatar of a better and braver high school self, the racial and intergenerational themes became more prominent, while the Patti character largely remained Patti, with fictional details created or rearranged for plot.
When I pull up, her house is dark; her father doesn’t come home from the mines until late in the evening, so she doesn’t leave the lights on.
I’ve never met Jessie’s mom. One Thanksgiving, long before Jessie and I became friends, an Arkin High student killed her when he came barreling down the wrong side of the street in his pickup–apparently he’d been drinking while watching the football game
I stare out at the night. I won’t drive drunk tonight–or any night. No way.
Jessie opens the door to the car. “Hi, Ellen,” she said. As she hoists herself into the Blazer, the flowery smell of Sweet Honesty fills the car, followed by the slight trace of cooking smell—fried something.
In homage, I had even left the character’s name as “Patti.” How it changed to “Jessie,” I will explain.
While I was still working on the novel, I pooled all my vacation time from my day job and went to the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, where I got to work with the late wondrous Nancy Willard. One critique she had was that the two characters, Ellen and Patti, were “too alike.” Maybe revise Ellen “up” and Patti “down,” she suggested. I still remember the hand motions she made. Up and down. So I indeed made Ellen even nerdier (and much kinder) than I was high school, and roughened the Patti character around the edges. However you want to look at it, these changes helped get the book into a publishable state.
When Houghton Mifflin bought the book, I giddily sent Patti the manuscript, excited to see what she’d think about the daredevil BFF character, modeled so closely on her that, not unlike what happened in For Sale/Kidney Story, I proudly used her real name.
I assumed she would be over the moon for me and be happy to see a fictional version of our friendship immortalized in print. And I inadvertently proved the truism one of our teachers used to use, that to assume makes an ASS out of U and ME.
She called to let me know she’d read the manuscript. Then she started yelling at me about how angry she was at what I had done, and then hung up. I, confused and panicked, called back only to get various iterations of the loud hang-up. This was in the time of landlines and hang-ups were pretty emphatic. Finally, her husband answered the phone, and kindly said Patti didn’t want to talk to me and it would be better to just stop calling.
Of course I considered not publishing, but I comforted myself that although she had expressed her hurt over my “betrayal,” she never asked me not to publish. Honestly, I don’t know what I would have done if she did.
I did frantically call my editor to have the name changed to “Jessie.” I remember being in extremis to the point my editor said, “Wow, this makes me wonder how much else in the book is true.”
With fiction, it’s all true, and it’s all a lie. The relevant issue was whether I was being a Bad Art friend at that moment. It reminds me a little bit of Bob Dylan, who was also from our town. In his early post-Hibbing years, exploring the folk scene, many people would dig out their prized one-of-a-kind folk records only to find the next day they’d been swiped by Dylan because he so single mindedly needed them. That was an unequivocally rotten thing to do, and legally actionable, but now that Dylan is Dylan, no one called foul, everyone seemed glad for their small contribution to American arts and culture. Was that similar to what I was doing? Tearing single-mindedly into my project and hoping for forgiveness later? Would that require me becoming as famous and influential as Dylan as a justification?
I didn’t know, and maybe I still don’t know. All I knew is that I had set myself on a path that I wanted to follow, and did.
But I still missed her. I told her so, in various missives I would put in the mail every few months (I was too terrified to call). They were never reciprocated.
Until one day.
My second book, a middle grade novel set in junior high and completely Patti free, had just been published and had gotten some press in the Minneapolis newspapers, including mentions that I was in town. Patti, who had moved there shortly after our high school graduation, called me up without preamble, congratulated me on my new book, told me she had a coupon for a favorite restaurant, Ciatti’s (RIP), and would I help her fulfill the buy one, get one?
I was ready to leap into her arms when we met, but she clearly was not intending to resume where we left off. Conflict avoidant as always, I didn’t push. I ate my meal, we talked about my new book. I remember we laughed, sporadically, perhaps about how “cappuccino” at this restaurant was Sanka with whipped cream on top. The connection was still there.
We tentatively put each other on Christmas card lists. With social media, we friended and accepted the requests. We enjoyed spying on her former piano nemesis this way. Years later, she and another high school friend, Lisa, visited me in New York. Back at the apartment, she noticed my compendia of MADs and asked to borrow one. We still didn’t talk about “it.” The novel had gone out of print for a second time years ago, so it seemed we could just not talk about it forever.
Occasionally things go better than you expect—not often, even less often in publishing, but it happens. My novel had a brief second life at HarperCollins, then promptly went out of print again. But maybe 10 years later, an out-of-nowhere BuzzFeed article listed Finding My Voice as one of 15 YA Books From The ’80s And ’90s That Have Stood The Test Of Time, and set it on its third reanimation, with Soho Press.
This time, I resolved to be a better friend than artist. During a visit to Minneapolis, I asked Patti—making sure to do it while we were driving in a car and at night so I wouldn’t have to look at her—if it was “okay” to republish.
“Oh my God Mawee,” she said, using my childhood nickname. “Of course it is.”
“But, um, you were kind of mad back then.”
“I was out of my mind then.”
She explained more about what she’d been going through at the time, and she said she felt she had acted inappropriately. I told her that the things she had said to me in anger—”You ripped out huge pieces of my life.” “Is that what you think of me?”—still stand. My bleating “But you were the hero in the book and in my life” was not a good defense on my part. I built a character on the details of her life I had gleaned as her friend, not someone doing an interview, something I now do routinely for research for my fiction.
Patti was sincere in her permission for this third go-round. Needing to reread it for republication, I was startled at how the novel now read like it had been written by someone else. Obviously, I could easily pick out where I mined the shared details of our lives, but enough time has passed that I could see that the real/actual memories had been transformed beyond recognition–something I think Patti saw before I did. I remember writing that very first draft, being conscious that I was altering the “car accident” narrative to include alcohol, to make a character point that Ellen is aware she would not drink and drive—only to find the lived detail was Patti’s mother having a heart attack in the car, which I had somehow misremembered as a car accident. Thus, this detail in the book, which works in the text to provide characterization is still “inspired” if not “copied” from a real person’s life—and the most devastating event of that person’s life, at that. Is it okay to use it just for my “art”? I consider then the grace she extended to me despite my complete lack of consideration of her feelings when we were 28 and I was working so hard to get published. In late 2020, I casually informed my high school friends via group email about my virtual (COVID-19) launch for Finding My Voice, and I almost cried with joy to see her face in the Zoom panes.
Last, week, I did a book club visit to group of Korean American adults reading YA. All the readers, one by one, mused on how much better their high school lives would have been if they had had a Jessie by their side. They were all amazed and somewhat envious when I explained Jessie was more or less my real BFF. I know that I am lucky this way, now more than ever. Not just to have a viable writing career but to have a lifelong friend.
One important life lesson from these decades of career, ambition, writing, and friendship is that change is real and it’s happening all the time despite our attempts to deny it. What both Art Friend stories show is that there’s no one way to be an artist, and there’s no one way to be a friend. The who-what-why changes over time, as do the boundaries of what is moral, ethical, allowable. What is appropriation, what is theft, and the big question: Is the artist solely responsible for her art (for praise or opprobrium, including the legal kind)? I think the only remedy is to resist our very human urge to adjudicate sides: Who’s right? Who’s the bad one here? This is a toxic path that can spiral forever, with nothing resolved, feelings continually hurt, nothing generative, and only the lawyers and the third-party chronicler (in Bad Art Friend’s case) profiting. If there’s one thing being Buddhist has taught me, it’s that once you let go of attempting to impute value—win/loss, good/bad—to whatever it is unfolding in front of your face, you can actually be open to what the moment is. And that by just being actively kinder, defaulting to the kinder impulse is spiritually profitable for all. In my defense, my version of our friendship is also mine to tell, and it is my blind spot to not consider others’ feelings while I work that actually allows me to create; in fact, I consider such focus a help, not a hindrance as far as my writing is concerned. Furthermore, we see that no one actually owns memories, and even these change with time and perspective. For Patti and me, the very same event that was “bad” back then has proved to be “good” today. But the whole time, the only thing that mattered and still matters is our connection, in art and life.
Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons.
