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

Dear friends,

Washington, DC

Before sitting down to write this letter, I went and looked up the blog post I wrote after I finished Book 1 of My Struggle. I do not want to link to it here, but I will say that I noted three things. First, that I loved the writing ("He is a brilliant writer and an exceptional thinker, and the fact that he was able to write about his own meandering life—that's it! that's the whole point of the book! just this one person's everyday existence!—but write it so well that people want to read it and talk about it and translate it and heap praise on it is testament to that."). Second, that only a straight, white man could write this book and have it be a literary project instead of a commentary on womanhood or race or sexual identity or whatever else. And third, that I was glad that I didn't know Knausgaard in real life, because I knew that I would have a crush on him, but also that I was glad that I did not know him and so could not develop this crush. "Because self-awareness is such a beautiful thing to behold, and Knausgaard is clearly incredibly aware of himself, and of how he sees the world, and of who he was and where he's been. It is beautiful, what's in his head. But this is surely because he lives in his head, and is aware of the self at the expense of awareness of others, though he says that he spends time imagining other people's connections and relations and pasts."

I don't recognize the person who wrote that. I mean, I do, it was I, I wrote it, and I meant it, but now all that lingers is that only a straight, white man could write this (to answer Omari—yes, this is the whitest shit ever), and that Karl Ove Knausgaard's self-awareness is suffocating for anyone who isn't Karl Ove Knausgaard.

I have read all of the first five volumes, and I didn't feel this way. I was really looking forward to this, the sixth, because I still think the concept is exceptional, to be able to mine one's own mundane experience for truth and beauty such that it becomes not mundane. And I can't tell if it's because this is the first of the My Struggle books that I've read since the 2016 presidential election (although I've read his Autumn, Spring, and Summer since then, one of which details his wife's breakdown, so the closing promise that he would never do anything like this to his family again was broken) or because he decided to devote hundreds of pages to Adolf Hitler, but this is not an exceptional book.

There are still passages that strike me. There's one moment where he's going through his morning, and he does the laundry and goes into town and I found myself thinking, "Wait, where are his kids?," and then, like, three paragraphs later he's wondering the same thing. And that's not an experience I often have when reading, to be so fully immersed in another person's thinking, or their performance of that thinking, that I anticipate it. That's a kind of sharing of consciousness. That's empathy.

But Knausgaard can't seem to extend that empathy to others. Even his description of how his uncle must see him is written in such a way as to let Knausgaard come out on top.

More upsettingly, while Knausgaard still does mine his own experience for truth, when he applies the same introspection to literally anyone or anything that is not him, he comes up with pseudoscience.

Of Africans (Knausgaard distinguishes between Norwegian and Swedish but won't say which African country he means, but I digress), he writes that they have the right idea, and that we should cut off aid to cut off dependence and let things revert to their natural way of being. Of Naziism, he writes that it is the only alternative to capitalism ever presented. He defends Peter Handke for attending Slobodan Milosevic's funeral because Handke was a truly original author (I'm sure there were other potentially truly original authors who were killed in the Balkan wars on Milosevic's orders, but never mind). He writes that all journalists write in the same voice and copy one another's articles because actually society is the author (as a journalist, I would just like to interject to say that this is not how anything works).

None of this is original. None of this is even factually accurate. This is what I expected from a man wearing black in my sophomore philosophy and political theory class, not a man being billed as undertaking the greatest literary experiment in my lifetime.

But more upsetting than the unoriginality and even the distortion of reality is the distance. A war crime is not a thought experiment. It is an action with consequences. If you're going to treat it as something to mull over at your computer in between trips to the balcony for gulps of coffee and a cigarette, fine, but at least write about it as though it's at least as serious as being annoyed with your wife or being worried that your uncle will sue you. The amazing thing about these books, for me, was that he made the individual universal. But he refuses to make the universal individual. Any one of the millions of people who died in the Holocaust could have also filled volumes with the petty minutia of their European lives. I can't believe this needs to be explained to people, let alone Nordic intellectuals penning bestsellers.

And, lest this be accused of being part of offense culture, let me just say that I'm not offended. I'm just disappointed.

Maybe I'm just less patient than I was three years ago — with the world, with books, with straight, white men who refuse to consider that the others have as rich an interiority as their own. Maybe this is just the worst of the books. Maybe both.

But this self-awareness was all self and no awareness. It was not a beautiful thing to behold.

Love,

Emily

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