Happiest Moment by Lydia Davis, 2001
The magic trick:
Brilliantly building on a reference to a different book
Yesterday, we featured Ling Ma’s “Peking Duck” on SSMT. The story brilliantly references both Mark Salzman’s memoir Iron And Silk and the Lydia Davis story “Happiest Moment.”
So today I figured it made sense to look at that Davis gem.
“Happiest Moment,” itself, plays off a story highlighted in Iron And Silk. “Peking Duck” just ups the ante even higher for commenting on the commenting of the comment.
“Happiest Moment” is very short. It’s a paragraph long. You’ll need to read it a few times to catch all the layers. Every pronoun is essential as it makes it devilishly clever point about story ownership.
And that’s quite a trick on Davis’s part.
The selection:
If you ask her what is a favorite story she has written, she will hesitate for a long time and then say it may be this story that she read in a book once: an English-language teacher in China asked his Chinese student to say what was the happiest moment in his life. The student hesitated for a long time. At last he smiled with embarrassment and said that his wife had once gone to Beijing and eaten duck there, and she often told him about it, and he would have to say the happiest moment of his life was her trip, and the eating of the duck.
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