Karl Ove Knausgaard: the shame of writing about myself

As the penultimate volume of the controversial six-book literary phenomenon My Struggle is published in English, Karl Ove Knausgaard reflects on exposing intimate details of his life and his family to write his epic ‘non-fiction novel’

It was a summer’s day 18 years ago and I was sitting in a car with my brother. We were in Kristiansand, the town my father was from, and had stopped at a junction and were waiting for a gap in the traffic so we could pull out. It was hot and overcast, and as we were waiting it began to rain. My brother switched on the wipers, I remember, and then without looking at me said: “You can write about this. No one’s going to believe it anyway.”

We were in Kristiansand because my father had died. And what my brother was referring to there in the car were the circumstances of his death. Neither of us had been in touch with him during his final years and although we were aware that a lot of strange stuff had been going on – once we were informed that he had disappeared and the police were out searching for him, only for him to turn up at a hospital a few days later, unable to walk having suffered some kind of temporary paralysis, for which reason he was sent to a treatment home for alcoholics – it all took place outside our field of vision and was therefore rather abstract. Our father drank too much, we knew that, but what that actually entailed was still something we were ignorant about. We didn’t want to know either. Our uncle called my brother one time and told us we had to do something and take care of our father, but we said no, that was out of the question, he had to look after himself. So it came as no surprise to us to receive word that he was dead. The shock came when we travelled down to Kristiansand, to the house in which he had grown up, where he had lived out his final years together with his mother, our grandmother. There were bottles everywhere, on the floors, up the stairs, on all the tables and sideboards, and the fine old home we had visited so often throughout our childhoods had degenerated completely. It looked like a squat. Our grandmother had found dad in his chair, but she was in shock. Confused, she shuffled about the house as thin as a skeleton, and when we asked her about what had happened she would tell us it had been morning when she found him, only the next moment to insist it had been evening. When we visited the chapel to see our father for the last time, his nose was broken and the pores of his face seemed to be clogged with blood which the staff of the funeral parlour had been unable to remove.

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