What’s the weirdest coincidence you’ve ever experienced?
I read this question in the middle of the night, then slept on it, chewed it over, debated it and even dreamt about it.
My first answers were really examples of serendipity rather than weird coincidence. There was the extraordinary discovery that a girl I had only just started to fall for was going to be staying in the same remote part of the Lake District as me. A few miles apart in the middle of nowhere. Improbable, certainly, but not weird. Lovely, actually. It meant we got to fall in love.
For weird, I have to go back to 2003 and Diaryland.
I was deeply immersed in the early blogging culture then, posting virtually every day, reading other people’s diaries and exchanging comments with people I knew only through what they wrote. It was an extraordinarily intimate little world. Some people already had substantial reputations; others were simply voices on a screen who would later become much better known.
At the same time, I was reading Norman Mailer obsessively. I had read Harlot’s Ghost, and when The Spooky Art appeared I treated it almost as a virtual masterclass in writing. I wasn’t merely reading it: I was taking extensive notes, pulling it apart, testing his observations against my own attempts to write novels and posting the whole process on Diaryland.
On 2 July 2003 I explicitly turned it into a kind of online study group. I wrote:
“I’m offering up some quotes here… I’ve included page references with the expectation that you’ll buy the book too, so we can share notes. Please add your thoughts on what Norman Mailer has to say.”
So there I was, sitting somewhere in England, talking into the still relatively tiny world of early blogging about Mailer’s ideas on ego, stamina, craft and what it meant to be a novelist, and inviting whoever happened to be reading to argue about them with me.
And then, as I remember it, somebody did.
The exchange was about Mailer’s ideas and, I think, specifically about how and why The Spooky Art had been put together. There was something about the knowledge behind the response — the perspective from which it was written — that gradually made me think I was not talking to another reader at all.
I think I was talking to Norman Mailer.
And that is where it becomes properly weird.
I no longer have the exchange, so I cannot produce the forensic evidence and say, “There. It was definitely him.” Twenty-three years later, memory has inevitably blurred the edges. Perhaps somebody was winding me up. Perhaps I inferred too much. Perhaps somewhere in the lost archaeology of Diaryland there is an entirely mundane explanation.
But my memory is that I threw a discussion of Norman Mailer out into the internet and Norman Mailer appeared in it.
That still gives me a small shiver.
Not because it would have been impossible for him to find it. By 2003 authors were perfectly capable of searching for references to themselves online. What was strange was the collision of scale: I was treating a famous American novelist as an absent tutor, painstakingly annotating his book and inviting my tiny circle of readers to join my imaginary seminar — and then had the distinct impression that the tutor had walked into the room.
Of all the coincidences I can remember, that’s the one that still feels spooky.
Appropriately enough.
Leave a Reply