Is That You?

I love this quote, almost an explanation of writing, from James Baldwin's 1955 Notes of a Native Son,

"One writes out of one thing only—one's own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from the experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give. This is the only real concern of the artist, to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art."

Whenever I tell people about the novel, they (strangers and acquaintances) always ask, "Is it about...