For a writer who has been interrogated by dozens of journalists, it’s striking how little Knausgaard has said about the world. Meeting him in person is an uncanny experience, because he comes off as both an intimate acquaintance and a total stranger. His features are utterly familiar from magazine profiles and book covers (the pale eyes, the wave of silvery-metallic hair) and yet also unexpected (the nicotine stain between his two front teeth). When we met for breakfast this summer, he ordered a bowl of muesli, a beige mound he shoveled into his mouth with several quick scrapes of his spoon. He was drinking so much coffee that morning, he said, partly to compensate for having quit smoking six weeks earlier.

Book Six contains much of the familiar Knausgaard. During the fallout from Book One, he writes, members of his extended family in Norway threatened to take him to court, bitterly rejecting the book’s version of events. In an email with the subject line “Verbal Rape,” his uncle accused him of writing “this despicable, immoral, and self-centered shambles of a book” to “get back at the family” and get rich. The uncle takes his complaints to Knausgaard’s publisher and to the press, resulting in an all-engulfing public ordeal, with journalists waiting to ambush the author in the streets. Later, when Linda reads a draft of Book Two, she learns that Knausgaard attempted to cheat on her and the couple have a flaming row.

Now, he agonizes over the consequences. “This novel has hurt everyone around me,” he writes in Book Six. “It has hurt me, and in a few years, when they are old enough to read it, it will hurt my children.” But when I asked him whether it was worth such a high cost, he gave an unequivocal yes. He defends the writer’s right to be immoral, to be a “terrible person” as he put it, since otherwise he is only abetting the silence that society imposes on our darkest thoughts and feelings, about death, sex, love. “There must be a place where you can be, where you can write, where you can think, without a façade at all,” he said. If anything, he added, his book fell short because he was not callous enough, because he could actually feel the pain he was inflicting on the people he was writing about. “I tried to fight it, I tried to be more immoral.”



He is perhaps at his most terrible in the concluding section of Book Six, which recounts in harrowing detail Linda’s descent into a suicidal depression, possibly triggered by the controversy surrounding My Struggle. This window into his family’s bleakest hour was apparently part of a conscientious push to hold nothing back, to atone for what he sees as the dishonest timidity that pervades Books Three, Four, and Five, which itself was a product of the public backlash that met Books One and Two. That his ex-wife has borne the brunt of his revived appetite for truth-telling—that, besides Knausgaard himself, she is the most brutally exposed of all the characters in My Struggle—is a painful topic for Knausgaard, but also the topic he seems able to talk about most proficiently and fluently. “You try to get as close as you can, like a one-to-one relation to life,” he told me, “and then it doesn’t feel like stealing or taking.”

When the conversation turned to politics, by contrast, he was often at a loss for words, sinking into prolonged silences and squinting into space as if he were seeking an answer written hazily in the distance. The tension that hovers over Book Six isn’t so much the ethical conundrum that comes from revealing his loved ones so nakedly, a conundrum with which he has apparently made his peace. Rather, it is whether the lights that have guided him as a writer—an aversion to morality, a hyper-focus on the self, and an unwavering belief that feelings come closer to the truth than the intellect—can illuminate a less personal theme.