My Struggle , vol. 6: Cecily, October 9

Knausgaard: Mommy Blogger

Princeton, NJ

I'm writing this post from the café within the Princeton Public Library, where, at the table across from mine, a dad is doing a valiant job ignoring his three young children. The eldest (maybe seven?) is sitting in a chair, looking bored. The middle one (maybe four?) is finishing his snack. And the youngest (maybe two?) is toddling around the table in circles, jabbering.  The dad is blankly staring at his phone, as the children grow progressively more restless.

Before having a child, I would have barely registered this family. Now, with a two-year-old, and another baby on the way, I'm always watching how parents occupy public space with their kids. As I study, with a mixture of both identification and disapproval, this dad on his phone, an observation from Knausgaard's sixth installment of My Struggle resonates. Losing his temper as he tries to wrest his daughter Heidi from the playground, Knausgaard reflects that we continue to judge other parents' behavior, even as we recognize their behavior in ourselves:

"That's enough from you, I said, wrenching her away and carrying her back to the stroller. She screamed at the top of her lungs. People stopped and stared. It was what she wanted. But they couldn't see that. They thought I was hitting her or something. I thought the same thing whenever I saw mothers or fathers stopped over their children like that, their aggressive body language always made me think they had to be bad parents, people of the worst possible kind, even though I knew what it was like" (111).

In my own life, I am aware of some of my parenting hypocrisies, but this knowledge doesn't always have much effect on my feelings or conduct. I feel almost virtuous when I ignore my daughter while reading a book or a magazine: "I'm modeling reading!" But I feel guilty when I check my phone in front of her and I judge parents doing the same. For her, these two activities are probably no different. The other day, when my husband was on his phone, she commented, "Daddy's reading!" When she was about 6 months old, I was pushing her in her stroller, and I stopped to read a text message. A passerby scolded my inattention: "Your daughter is singing you a song!" My blood boiled, even as I was sure to turn the same censorious eye on the next texting parent.

In Book 6, Knausgaard ruminates on all of the ways in which lived experience doesn't necessarily make us wiser or better. For me, the best moments of Knausgaard are when he dilates the daily experience of parenting, slowly unfolding its smallest joys and ruthlessly cataloging its banalities, without congratulating himself for his immersion in his children's lives or deriving sanctimonious lessons. In a particularly memorable scene, he devotes pages and pages to the description of giving his children a bath, furnishing answers to the insignificant questions fellow parents like to ask (what type of shampoo do you use? Do you wash their hair every bath? What do you do when they splash too much?) and exposing his own peculiar anxieties, namely that if anyone saw him washing his children between their legs they might mistake him for a pervert.

I'm certainly not the first person to favorably compare Knausgaard to a mommy blogger. In fact, he might be one of the very best mommy bloggers around. Mommy blogging is a derided genre because of the perception that it elevates the inanities of parenting into important topics. Knausgaard's self-seriousness has a corrective effect on such a conception. There can be no sneering at Knausgaard's detailed depiction of putting his children to bed or making them dinner. He lingers too long on each small step in each process, giving such unstinting access to the range of feelings that the daily care of children elicits—irritation, amusement, boredom, devotion—that the triviality of so much of parenting (a domain of insignificance that has been historically assigned to the mother) becomes not so much significant as inescapable, a fundamental obstacle to and catalyst of writing projects and literary ambition. Mommy blogging is, for Knausgaard, an ur-demonstration of authorship in general. Perhaps this is a different way of characterizing what Stephanie brilliantly calls Knausgaard's questioning of whether "we can take ourselves, our individual selves, out of writing."

I haven't gotten to Knausgaard's Hitler section yet (I'm not even close!), where Stephanie sees Knausgaard as doubling down on the other mode that characterizes his writing—the extended essay. But I already feel my distaste for Knausgaard's essayistic mode growing stronger as I read this volume. Knausgaard's parenting explorations embed him a network of other lives and other domestic stories, a quality that theorists of women's autobiography see as defining the genre, where the self does not stand apart from its historical situation or familial entanglements. But in his essayistic mode, Knausgaard becomes almost satirically bombastic as he ruminates on how "excellence is bound up with the personal" (122) and the ineluctable "value of the [written] work itself" (123). Perhaps, like Stephanie argues, Knausgaard does indeed intend for his Hitler essay to illustrate that an author who stands apart from his context will fail. I'll need to pick up my reading pace if I'm to find out.

With great affection for my fellow slow-burners,

Cecily

ALSO IN THIS SERIES:

The Slow Burn, v.2: Welcome Back

The Slow Burn, v.2: An Introduction

My Struggle, vol. 1: Cecily, June 6

My Struggle, vol. 1: Diana, June 9

My Struggle, vol. 1: Omari, June 14

My Struggle, vol. 2: Dan, June 17

My Struggle, vol. 2: Omari, June 24

My Struggle, vol. 2: Cecily, July 1

My Struggle, vol. 2: Sarah Chihaya, July 5

My Struggle, vol. 2: Dan, July 12

My Struggle, vol. 2: Diana, July 16

My Struggle, vol. 2: Jess Arndt, July 18

My Struggle, vol. 3: Omari, July 25

My Struggle, vol. 3: Ari M. Brostoff, August 1

My Struggle, vol. 3: Dan, August 4

My Struggle, vol. 3: Jacob Brogan, August 8My Struggle, vol. 3: Diana, August 12

My Struggle, vol. 4: Katherine Hill, August 25

My Struggle, vol. 4: Omari, September 1

My Struggle, vol. 4: Dan, September 2

My Struggle, vol. 4: Diana, September 15

My Struggle, vol. 5: Omari, September 27

My Struggle, vol. 5: Diana, October 3

My Struggle, vol. 5: Dan, October 13

My Struggle, vol. 6: Omari, September 25

My Struggle, vol. 6: Dan, September 28

My Struggle, vol. 6: Stephanie, October 5

My Struggle, vol. 6: Cecily, October 9

My Struggle, vol. 6: Emily Tamkin, October 10

My Struggle, vol. 6: Diana, October 15

My Struggle, vol. 6: Rachel Greenwald Smith, October 23

My Struggle, vol. 6: Katherine Hill, October 26

My Struggle,  vol. 6: Omari, October 31