Doesn’t all experience crumble in the end to mere literary material?

The question frames lived experience as something that, with time and reflection, is stripped of its immediacy and converted into narrative—“material” to be shaped, revised, and repurposed. It suggests a writer’s double vision: even while living, one is already (or eventually becomes) an arranger of events, turning pain, love, failure, and memory into art. The word “crumble” implies loss as well as transformation: experience decays as fact but survives as language. In Glasgow’s case—often read as a realist attentive to social constraint and private disillusionment—the line can be taken as both a defense of artistic transmutation and a rueful admission that literature may be what remains when life’s certainties erode.