Experience, the parody

Or "digested in the style of the original," as described on the Guardian Unlimited web site, 26 May 2000 (click "Experience parodied" above to read the entire text, as long as it is available online; the following is an excerpt):

There will be no point-scoring, valued reader, though if you're reading this, Jules, I'd like to say that it was you who turned away from me, not I who turned away from you. So you can fuck right off for a start. And as for you, Thersites Eric, who demeaned and defiled our family after Kingsley's death, I'll deal with you and the toiling small-holders of the Fourth Estate in a 10-page appendix.

Rather, this is the journey through the unconscious, the "un" conscious, the un, of how the fledgling Osric became Hamlet, Prince of Westbourne Grove. It is here in the world of un, that murky novelist's landscape, where experience is collected, connections are made and communion is Freely given and received. Here we will find the pain schedule, the climacteric collision of the missing and the lost, the Delilahs and the Lucys, and the loves that come and go. There is no morality. What must be, must be. All we can do is rage and hurt and pay the bill.

. . . 

The mid-90s were my lurid years, using lurid strictly according to the condensed epic poem of the Fowlers' article in the COD. A mid-life crisis is critical in a man; a man who reaches his forties without one has no concept of the continuum of being. The beginnings and the endings. And all things must end. My marriage to Antonia was ending, my teeth had prematurely resigned and Kingsley was creeping to his reluctant adieu. Only Saul, the world's other great novelist, could truly comfort."

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