The autobiographical dimension of Christos Tsiolkas's early fiction is not terribly hard to trace. If we read his first two novels—Loaded and The Jesus Man—alongside obviously autobiographical works like Jump Cuts or his book on The Devil's Playground, which charts a very personal experience of Fred Schepisi's film, we can see that the conflicts and tensions that he foregrounds in his vision of his own life are also those of his principal characters. This only becomes clearer when we look at interviews and newspaper articles that focus heavily, if not overwhelmingly, on Tsiolkas's life and family background. However, the term “autobiographical” is misleading in this context. If we understand it as establishing the relationship between a life and a written work, between a lived experience and a work of literature, then we also need to acknowledge that the term opens itself to a certain kind of arbitrariness. How one imagines one's own life, in other words, is conditioned by narrative conventions and conceptual frameworks that organize it in a certain way, that shape it around conflicts, oppositions, hopes and disappointments that are all materially determined. In this context, the notion of experience is worth dwelling upon for a moment, if only to highlight its constantly contested and inherently volatile character. Critical theory, for instance, insists that the quality and texture of our experience is one of the things most at stake in our integration into capitalist modernity. Walter Benjamin's famous discussion of shock, to take one leading example, hinges on the distinction between a localized, visceral moment of lived experience (Erlebnis) and a more robust order of consciousness bound up with memory, temporality and futurity (Erfahrung). For a long line of critical theorists working in the Frankfurt School tradition, this second sense of experience is precisely what capitalist ideology disorganizes. As Miriam Hansen puts it, Erfahrung implies something that is “mnemonic, mimetic, and collective”; it thus also offers a kind of emancipatory potential absent in the immediate experience of everyday life. In contrast, what Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge call the “context of commodity fetishism” constitutes experience in a way that is inherently mystified, erodes its collective possibilities and reorients it to a sequence of “private interests.”