Unpleasant Writing Acquaintance

It’s late afternoon when I call Daisy Dunhill, author, activist and dog-fight entrepreneur. Down the phone her voice sounds deep and resonant, booming good-naturedly to me in much the way I imagine Santa Claus would. An essayist and aspiring novelist who frequently fails to take hints, Dunhill is an upbeat person, who seeks positive energy and eats grass regularly. She signs her emails, not “All best” or “Sincerely”, but “THE BEES!!!!!!!”

In 2015, after completing a defensive driving course, Dunhill did perhaps the kindest thing she will ever do: she donated her entire head to a needy patient. Her head was not meant for anyone in particular, but then as her mother always says, it never was. After making the donation, Dunhill made another momentous decision: she would post about it on Facebook. She started a private group and invited her family, both of her friends, and a bunch of people from her old writing workshop who’d been careless about who they accepted friend requests from. After her head was removed, she posted something to Facebook: a graphic photograph of a decaying mole, and a heartfelt letter which read:

Finally the dreams will stop. No more shall voices order me to kill. No more shall I awake each night to see the walls running red with blood. Now my curse is yours, unhappy fool. THE BEES!!!!!

After a few weeks, Dunhill noticed something odd: the military-industrial complex seemed to depend for profitability on the inflammation of tensions in the Middle East, rather than seeing any advantage in a peaceful resolution. Also, some of the people in her Facebook group hadn’t commented on how fucking awesome she was. Vowing bloody vengeance, she wrote an email to one, the writer Tonya Harding.

Harding and Dunhill had met after both falling into the same manhole on the same day. They had made out a little, but nothing came of it. However, they had something in common: both women were writers and therefore much more special than normal people.

Hi, Dunhill’s email to Harding ran. Did you know that I’m really amazing?

Oh yes, Harding replied. Congratulations on being the best person ever.

Dunhill was confused. Why hadn’t Harding offered to throw her a big fucking party for being so fucking great? In fact, why wasn’t anyone from her old writing group offering to throw big fucking parties and kiss her fucking feet?

It didn’t take long for a clue to surface. Later in whatever year it now was, Dunhill received a text message from an old friend. Tonya just read a great story about some stupid bitch with no head, it said. Maybe she was inspired by you, seeing you’re so fucking wonderful and everything.

Dunhill, scared and confused and unattractive, immediately wrote another email to Harding. Hey sexy, it began, trying to keep things light, I hear you wrote a story about headless people. Can I read it, not passive-aggressively but in a normal way?

Harding did not reply. Dunhill tried again. Let me read your story, bitch.

Finally, Harding replied. You’re not allowed to read my story because my story is for cool people like me and my friends and you’re not cool haha.

Dunhill tried not to take this personally, but since having her head removed her judgment had been suspect. When she finally did read the story, which was slid under her door by a mysterious man in a black coat late one night, she was shocked. One passage in particular caught her eye:

Hi my name’s Daisy and I’m a big fat weird pig who smells like shit and I like to wet myself on public transport. THE BEES!!!!!!!!!!!!!

There was little doubt in Daisy’s neck: this was a reference to her. The sign-off was unmistakable. She told her husband about the outrage, but since her husband was actually just a box of breadcrumbs that she’d drawn a face on, he had little to contribute.

Only one course of action was now open to her: she had to sue Tonya Harding.

Tonya Harding has a soft, gentle way of speaking that belies the constant stream of abusive filth that spews from her mouth. As a mixed-race child whose parents refused to let her eat anything she hadn’t killed herself, she had had a difficult upbringing, not helped by the fact that she wanted to be a writer even though that’s a really dumb fucking idea.

Harding’s friends laud her ability, in her fiction, to create characters that can fly and have machine guns. “She has this weird knack,” says friend Hetty Spackle, “of making you laugh even while you vomit.”

The story she had written, which was titled Daisy Dunhill the Stupid Cunt I Want To Murder, was not, she says, directly inspired by her former manhole-sharer. “Sure, I may have gotten the initial idea from Daisy’s annoying bullshit,” she admits, “but in the end it’s a story about the human experience. It’s like saying that Jaws is a movie about a shark.”

Harding felt that Dunhill was being a “bad art friend”, and yet Dunhill thought that Harding was being a “bad art friend”. Who was to decide which was correct? Only the courts could do so.

Dunhill instructed her lawyer to sue Harding for $500,000 for plagiarism and pain and anguish from never writing a Facebook comment about how Dunhill was the best person she’d ever met and everyone on earth should get on their fucking knees and thank God for her.

Harding immediately hit back, suing Dunhill for $1 million for defamation and being a dirty whore. Dunhill countersued on the grounds that Harding sucked ass. All these lawsuits are still ongoing.

Dunhill claims that all she wants is some acknowledgment of her suffering and an admission that she is God’s most glorious creation. For her part, Harding says she would be happy with an apology and a public statement to the effect that as a writer, she can do whatever the fuck she wants and who are you to question her?

The whole affair, according to Speg Thlimbo, chairman of the New York Bulimic Lawyers Association, rests on a very thorny issue in law: who is more important, published authors or performative organ donors? “It’s not really settled law,” Thlimbo advised me in a fax from his offshore trout ranch. “The Supreme Court has agreed that if you have ever had a short story published, you are entitled to spit on anyone you like, but this case goes well beyond that.”

Harding’s friends are adamant that she’s done nothing wrong. “Why shouldn’t she plagiarise from Daisy? Daisy sucks balls,” points out fellow author Alex van Halen, who used to work with Harding at Subway. Conversely. Dunhill’s friends have mostly remained imaginary.

So, who is the Bad Art Friend? Is it the deluded halfwit who so lacks self-awareness that she sends emails to people she wrongly believes are her close friends to find out why they didn’t fawn over her on Facebook? Or is it the sociopathic narcissist who sincerely believes she can treat everyone on earth like dirt because she managed to con someone into Xeroxing a few copies of her pretentious brain-diarrhoea?

One thing is for certain: everyone on Earth’s life is now worse.