A writer can hit a saturation point with a familiar literary archetype

Evidence

I had furtively read Portnoy’s Complaint, The Professor of Desire, and Goodbye, Columbus as a preteen, books that felt less like fiction than fraught visits with the New Jersey wing of my own family. Which was very nearly true: my father was raised in the same working-class Newark neighborhood and went to the same school as Roth, Weequahic High, just a couple of grades behind. I remember thinking, as the book hit the wall, that I was done with all of it. That the human experience is vast and rich, and I already knew just about all I needed to know about the mommy issues of middle-aged Jewish men from the tri-state area. It was time to clear some mental space for some new ethnic archetypes with some less familiar neuroses. — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 451