What Is "One's Own Experience" Anyway
It’s said that Henry James would often interrupt a particularly fascinating anecdote from a dinner guest with a peremptoriness just this side of rude. You’d be in the middle of a story about, say, a governess friend who got a creepy vibe from the children she’d been hired to look after, or these two weirdos you used to know who couldn’t pass a church without ducking in to light a bunch of candles while wearing a mysterious, melancholy smile, and he’d suddenly reach out as if about to shush you and say “No, please — a thousand pardons — I beg of you — an unforgivable impertinence, but — the thing is too perfect —” and then you’d have to hang fire on the rest of your story while this potbellied invert makes his excuses and rushes off to turn the donnée you’ve given him, the “little nugget” of an anecdote, into, say, “The Turn of the Screw” or “The Altar of the Dead.”
There is this new genre of article — or, sometimes, just social media post — that fascinates me. It’s the “Famous Author, You Stole My Life” genre. Slate just published one the other day, in which a guy crashes a David Sedaris reading, tells Sedaris a funny anecdote about doing a particularly ill-advised sort of sexual experimentation upon himself, and then realizes that Sedaris is — gasp — writing down this anecdote to add it to his own repertoire. This makes the author of the article angry. He presents this story as though there were some obvious infringement of his own rights taking place here, although he admits, throughout the article, that he can’t identify exactly what line was crossed. The whole conversation seems to assume that there is an obvious, safe distinction somewhere to be made between one’s own experiences and the experiences one witnesses, hears about from others, or projects, and that artists should find a way to only draw from the first basket: from “one’s own experiences.” (Ideally, perhaps we would only make art about things that happen to us without other people being involved at all.)
The greatest examples of this genre, to me, are two.