Apart from the details everything is always the same
My Struggle Book 1
Author: Karl Ove Knausgaard
Released: May 2013
Published by: Farrar Straus & Giroux
My playlist for this book on Spotify.
I’d seen the cover of this novel online around the time it was published. I immediately judged this book by it’s cover: Your Struggle? Some dude looking like Gary Oldman bitching about his life? Not interested.
Then about a month ago I was trolling around Amazon gathering books to add to my shopping list, and My Struggle came up as a suggestion. A few people I follow on Twitter (all men) love Karl Ove Knausgaard, so I clicked Amazon’s ‘Look Inside’ feature to read the first page. I bought the book after reading the first two sentences:
“For the heart, life is simple: it beats for as long as it can. Then it stops.”
On the surface this is a book about death. Death is a theme that’s forever present in works of art, and My Struggle Book 1 is a tome that attempts to reflect mortality right back at the reader. There were days when I was so caught up in my reading I was underlining passages, crying, remembering my life as a small child and as a teenager, and other days I could barely get through the pages, slightly skimming ahead to see when some dialogue appeared on the page, certain I wouldn’t finish the book, and telling myself I didn’t have to finish if I didn’t feel like it. The writing is absolutely gorgeous and sometimes the gorgeous writing is describing very mundane, uninteresting facts, like when the narrator (who is Karl Ove by the way… this book is “fiction” but it’s not, it’s auto-fiction I suppose) is making the decision on whether or not to stay in his office and write. While contemplating this, there is a terse phone call to his wife, and then a second call back to her to apologize for being dismissive, and then a meandering walk out of the office, onto the street, and a commute home on public transportation. I read, and thought, perhaps the people he describes on the street will somehow be meaningful? Or a revelation on the commute? But nothing. Just description. I’m glad I read the whole book. The beginning, and ending, was worth some of the parts in the middle.
“The moment life departs the body it belongs to death.”
The novel opens up with a sweeping meditation on death and what happens to the body when it’s no longer alive, and how society consistently strives to conceal death from our everyday lives. The next hundred pages are about Karl Ove as a young boy. I can’t remember if his age is mentioned, but he felt to be around the age of a fourth grader in the very beginning of the book. Here, the most important relationship in the book begins, Karl Ove’s relationship with his father.
My earliest memories of my dad are a mixture of love, admiration, and fear. My father loomed. He was present for most of my childhood, but on the periphery. I always knew where he was based on the sounds from another room. The sound of sportscasters, the Law & Order dun-dun! sound that played in between scenes, or the conservative news show Crossfire blaring from our den meant my father was in a far corner of our house unwinding in front of the TV. If I heard him having an animated, one sided conversation in his office, he was on the phone, still working. Weekend mornings he could be heard making coffee, speaking softly to our cat, and then no noises except for the occasional rustle of a newspaper pages turning in between his fingers. This meant he was alone, wanting quiet before my mother woke up and the two of them spent time together in the living room by themselves.
Sometimes the absence of noise was a sign that he was getting irritated. If my sister or I was talking back to our mother, and our father’s TV was muted, it meant he was listening and could enter the room at any minute to defend his wife and yell at one of us. If the phone conversation became muffled it was because he slammed his office door, a warning that he was being disrupted. This quiet was a flip of a coin- whatever happened next could go either one of two ways. Either we’d become quiet and sounds from the other room would resume, or, he’d come to us and raise his voice.
It’s been well over a decade since my father yelled at me. My body’s response to his anger was the same for me as a small child as it was when I was a teenager and even a young woman. A heat surrounds my temples and my brain and I feel a stinging wetness behind my eyeballs. It’s as if my tears form there, and not in my tear ducts. If I blink, they’ll spill out, so I attempt to hold them in and regulate my breathing. Tears don’t evoke pity with my dad, they seem to make him angrier, which is baffling, since I know that whenever I cried he would feel terrible. But my father yells when he is angry and he yells when he feels terrible. When I am angry, I cry. Still.
I remember being very young, probably two or three, and my father was playing records in the TV room. I was in the next room, holding a balloon and spinning to the music. I got dizzy, fell, and hit my head on the corner of our coffee table. I remember sobbing on the ground and looking up to see my father running toward me, my blurry vision making it seem like he was shaking as he lumbered toward me. I remember not knowing whether or not I was about to be in trouble or about to be rescued as he darted to me, and utter relief when he picked me up to soothe me.
The opening pages describe a little boy who carefully navigates every move he makes in his home- literal moves like going from one room to another, and figurative movements such as intuitively reading his father’s facial expression, posture, and vocal tone to decide if he should even attempt conversation with this man. My own father didn’t cause daily precaution in me. Maybe because I am a daughter and not a son. He could be very soft with me, and extremely loving, or fun, or just regular. But that coin was always there. He could go either way.
“If he was outside the house or down in his study, we chatted as loudly and freely and with as many gestures as we liked; if he was on his way up the stairs we automatically lowered our voices and changed the topic of conversation, in case we were talking about something we assumed he might consider unseemly; if he came into the kitchen we stopped altogether, sat there stiff as pokers, to all outward appearances sunk in concentration over the food; on the other hand, if he retired to the living room we continued to chat, but more warily and more subdued.”
Do all kids experience this? Or just Karl Ove Knausgaard and me and my siblings?
My Struggle Book 1 is also about a man in his 40’s who is attempting to reconcile the wounds he collected during childhood while he is also trying to write a book. And I read this book over the last four weeks, the beginning of 2021, after a year long self exploration of deep inner child work and shadow therapy, attempting to integrate all I have learned about my childhood as an attempt to heal and move on from it, while also writing more in the last year than I ever have. And I’m 42. So what I am reading on the pages holds a mirror image of my life, my current life, while also connecting deeply to the life being written about.
I had two favorite sections in the book.
The first was in part one, where Karl’s teenage years are laid out. My teenage years feel like they were the most formative parts of my whole life. Meanwhile, psychology would say birth to age 7 is the most formative, but my life started to feel like it belonged to me when I was in middle school and high school, right around the time I started drinking. Karl Ove describes his first time drinking as a teenager:
“Someone who knew someone had a flat, someone knew someone who could buy beer for us, and so I sat there drinking in an unfamiliar living room one summer afternoon, and it was like an explosion of happiness, nothing held any danger or fear anymore, I just laughed and laughed, and in the midst of all this, the unfamiliar furniture, the unfamiliar girls, the unfamiliar garden outside, I thought to myself this is how I want things to be. Just like this. Laughing all the time, following whatever fancies took me.”
There are pages, dozens in a row, Karl Ove writes about school, sports, music, art, his family, his classmates, his insecurities, writing, life, philosophy. A large section of part one is Karl Ove and his friends trying to get alcohol to a New Years Eve party. Very little happens once he gets to the party, it’s a total let down for him, and for me as I read, as I kept waiting for something to happen. I feel like that was my entire life from eight grade until I was in my twenties. I was constantly waiting for something to happen. And everything that was happening was not good enough, except for a few brief intervals of pure exhilaration, but mostly nothing, and yet, I belabored everything. I am still quite capable of that even now.
Karl is such a teenage music snob. He credits his older brother for guiding his musical taste. He loves Talk Talk, The Cure, Ultravoxx, Talking Heads, Joy Division, The Velvet Underground, David Bowie, The Stooges, The Specials, REM, Echo & The Bunnymen. He is opinionated, easily offended, brooding, rude, insecure. The scenes where he describes when he first falls in love, with a classmate named Hanne, could have been pulled from a diary page of my own from middle school.
He reminds me of me. These feelings stuck inside of him, no language yet to express them, but this music that harmonizes all the thoughts inside of us. My older brother and sister returned from college when I was in 8th grade and their music found me. Liz Phair, Nine Inch Nails, The Smiths, My Bloody Valentine, Dinosaur Jr, Nirvana, Tori Amos, Mazzy Star, New Order. There are parts where he describes thinking of Hanne, and I was right back there in 1994. Walking home from school alone, in my bedroom alone, sitting in class daydreaming, picturing my boyfriend beside me, feeling like he was right there, just thinking of him made me feel whole. Just thinking about him made me feel the way I felt when he was right next to me.
My other favorite section is at the end of part one, when Karl Ove goes home to find his father, now divorced from his mother and dating another woman, having a party. There are members of Karl Ove’s family there- cousins, aunts, uncles, and everyone’s drinking and talking and music is playing and Karl’s dad invites him to stay and have a drink with everyone. Karl Ove is still a teenager and is surrounded by adults, and the scene is filled with secrets being revealed, drunkenness, lovers ducking into corners to be alone, passion, family, revelations. The adults in the room are having the same experiences that Karl Ove has been having, and I wonder do we ever grow up or do we just get older? I’m reminded now as I type of a poem written by Micah Ling:
Bon Iver: Holocene
There’s actually no such thing as an adult. That word is a placeholder. We never grow up. We’re not supposed to. We’re born and that’s it. We get bigger. We live through great storms. We get soaked to the bone. We realize we’re waterproof. We strive for calm. We discover what makes us feel good. We do those things over and over. We learn what doesn’t feel good. We avoid those things at all cost. Sometimes we come together: huge groups in agreement. Sometimes we clap and dance. Sometimes we look like a migration of birds. We need to remind ourselves—each other—that we’re mere breaths. But, and this is important, sometimes we can be magnificent, to one person, even for a short time, like the perfect touch—the first time you see the ocean from the middle. Like every time you see the low, full moon. We keep on eating: chewing, pretending we know what’s going on. The secret is that we don’t. We don’t, and don’t, and don’t. Each day we’re infants: plucking flower petals, full of wonder.
As the book lulls into part two, I struggled with My Struggle (I had to make a dumb joke like this at least once). But. The end. The ending started about 150 pages before it actually ended, and it was spectacular. My god, the last paragraph, the closing lines, I felt like my heart stopped when I read them. If a book can begin with some of the most beautiful lines I have ever read in my life and then conclude with one of the best closings to a book I have ever laid eyes on, holy shit, this was worth the read. I want to write the closing paragraph here but I won’t. I think you should see it for yourself. Best closing sentence ever, it tied up the preceding 440 pages perfectly.
It took me four weeks to read this book, and I have not googled or read anything about Book 1 online yet because I didn’t want to taint my own write up, but I did watch an amazing lecture Karl Ove gave at Yale in 2017 on why he wrote before I even started the book. This video is about an hour long, and when I watched it I developed a large crush on Karl Ove Knausgaard. He is a total babe.
The video made me answer the question why do I write? I always assumed I wrote as a way to create something meaningful out of the pain I felt inside. Knausgaard’s lecture allowed me to connect the dots on something I never fully realized previously. I write for the same exact reasons I drank. When I drank, I was searching for love and acceptance. I had no idea that love and acceptance was born inside of me, and remained there. I didn’t know how to feel okay with who I was, and when I drank, sometimes I was able to connect with others and briefly I felt alive. An endless search continues now that I am sober, and I innately feel love and acceptance toward myself and I no longer search for it in others, but instead use my gifts as a way to connect with my closest friends, my husband, women in the rooms of the 12 Steps. But still my writing. I write to feel accepted, loved, understood and connected to whomever reads my work. I don’t know if I am creating anything, instead I feel like I am trying to destroy the parts of me that no longer serve me and the outside voices that try to dictate who I am. I write as way to return to myself.
You can find the playlist I made as a soundtrack to My Struggle Book 1 here:
This first post is much longer than I anticipated it would be. If you made it this far, thank you and if you liked this, consider sharing it with friends.
Photo credit: Albert Renger-PatzschWinter Landscape with Oak Grove, Wamelc. 1955