My Struggle, vol. 6: Dan, September 18
Denton, Texas
Dear friends,
It's been a minute. I last wrote on October 13, 2016. Since then, a few big, world-historical events have changed the context for Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle. Lorde dropped Melodrama. Ambien made Roseanne Barr racist. The President of the United States, at midnight, sent a tweet that said, in full, "Despite all the negative press covfefe."
Today, Book 6 is out in the US. I've read two hundred of its eleven hundred and fifty-two pages. The latest the first five books brought us, chronologically, was, at the end of Book 2, to the birth of Karl Ove's first child and the beginning of his writing My Struggle. Book 6 begins just before the publication, in Scandinavia, of Book 1. He is sending the manuscript to everyone he's written about to get their response, and he's filled with despair, guilt, and anxiety (42). Across two hundred pages and three or four days, Karl Ove—while his wife is in the country with friends—walks his three children to daycare, feeds them, changes diapers, manages their emotions, and listens to his uncle deride him as a mendacious narcissist and threaten to take him to court and splash his name across the tabloids. "All I wanted was to lie down next to someone who could run their fingers through my hair and tell me everything was going to be all right," Knausgaard writes. "No one had ever done that then. Now there was someone who could, if only I let her. I never had. There was something shameful about it, degrading" (120).
So, we're back. Masculinity. Love. Humiliation. But, also, fictionality and form. Karl Ove reflects on the meaning of "dramatizing [his] father, allowing him to be a character in a story, representing him in the same way as fictional characters are represented" (180). What makes realism real, and when do aesthetics betray life?
I'll tell you what I know. I am at least as attracted to Karl Ove's earnest, self-lacerating masochism as I am repulsed by it. I feel the same about Knausgaard's dizzying autofictional craft. Sitting here at a long wooden table in a brick warehouse converted into a boutique café called Cryptozoology, next to the train tracks in Denton, Texas, wearing my Forever 21 ribbed rainbow tank, army green Uniqlo slacks, and Chuck Taylors ablaze with glittering rhinestones, pointedly at home in a femme masculinity that makes Knausgaard ill, it's easy for me to feel sanctimonious. That was partly why I started this letter with jokes: to cut through his self-seriousness, to distance myself. And yet, just as often, I find myself, as my girlfriend puts it, held by his words. Nowhere else do I get to luxuriate for what feels like eternity in the scrumptious self-pitying writerly brew of ambition, exhibitionism, insecurity, and shame.
To our readers: we decided to finish what we started. Across the next few months, we will write to each other as we complete the series. Most of us are back. You can expect letters from Jess Arndt, Jacob Brogan, Diana Hamilton, Cecily Swanson, and Omari Weekes. We will hear from a few new voices, too, including Stephanie DeGooyer, Marit MacArthur, Rachel Greenwald Smith, and Emily Tamkin.
I know I'll be challenged by all of you: confronted with what I see in Knausgaard and what, in my ignorance, I miss. I'll be delighted, provoked, and, yes, held, by your words. Happy to be back.
Yours,
Dan
ALSO IN THIS SERIES:
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