The sixth and final volume of “My Struggle” was published in English this fall. But it came out in Norwegian, in 2011, three years after Karl Ove Knausgaard began writing the first volume, in 2008. The person who wrote those books both is and is not the man who, last month, came by my office to talk about them. He is now, for one thing, famous in an unusual way, having shared a remarkable number of intimate and embarrassing details with his readers. (“I have to hide from myself how much people know about me,” he said.) He is divorced from Linda Boström, to whom he is married in the novel. He lives in London and has quit smoking. He seems to be happier.

To some readers, these changes may feel almost like a betrayal—as though “Karl Ove,” the character, has walked off the page, gone rogue. But if the passage of time has made the man a little blurrier, it’s also brought the novel into greater focus. Over the course of an afternoon’s conversation and a subsequent e-mail exchange, it became clear to me that I had not quite understood Knausgaard’s book. What I’d taken for a self-portrait was more like a snapshot, and what had seemed like a monument was actually something stranger—what Knausgaard, in our conversation, called a “cave in time.”

This interview has been edited and condensed.

Is it true that “My Struggle” was originally going to be twelve books?

Yes. In 2008, when I wrote Book 1 and Book 2, the head of the publishing house suggested twelve books—one each month. For practical reasons, that didn’t work out. But they said they could do six. All the books were to be published in a year, from 2009 to 2010. It would be more like an art project, almost, than a novel.

I had to decide how to write four more books. I already had one about my father’s death and a second about the present, with the children. The obvious thing was to go back in time. Then I thought that Book 5 could bite Book 1 in the tail—a circle. And Book 6 could be outside of that circle, dealing with the consequences of all of it. In the end, I did write Books 3, 4, and 5 during that year.

How did you write so much, so fast?

I wonder about that, too! It’s strange that, with three small children and limited time, I wrote so many pages a day while, before, when I spent all the time I wanted on writing, and even lived on isolated islands and in remote lighthouses, I hardly wrote anything. But writing “My Struggle” was all about lowering thresholds—between what was in my head and what was on the page, but also what was in the novel and what was in my life.

When I wrote my first novel—I was nineteen—I did it very quickly. If you write fast, you feel like you’re entering something not yet familiar—a world rather than thoughts about the world. The novel was crap, unbelievably silly and stupid, but at some point speed-writing became like reading, a place where I disappeared. When the novel was rejected, I lost belief both in myself and in speed. I started to polish the car instead of driving it—and, obviously, when you polish your car, you don’t get anywhere, no matter how nice the car looks.

“Total Recall” James Wood’s review of “My Struggle.”

I spent six years after my first novel and five years after my second without getting into a new book. That was what I was longing for, just to write at full speed. Book 1 was written slowly, in something like eight months. I spent oceans of time on the opening pages—the sentences were written and rewritten—but the rest of the sentences were written just once. Book 5 was written in eight weeks. When the books started to be published, I had incredibly tight deadlines, which was a great help. Then I couldn’t afford to think about quality, only quantity mattered.

So you were cruising—until Book 6.

I failed with Book 6. I had to bury that book, and I took a break and wrote a new version that was finished six months later.

What happened?

I knew so much about what people liked, I completely lost authenticity in the writing. I just mirrored and repeated things. It was awful—really awful. So I decided to just write about what was happening at that moment.

Book 6 is almost like a blog, with time stamps (“It’s the twelfth of June, 2011, the time is 6:17 A.M., in the room above me the children are asleep. . . . ”), whereas the previous volumes often focus on specific days or weekends. How did you choose those moments?

In the beginning, the method was different. We moved stuff around and took things out in order to make it into a novel. The first book opens with a reflection on death, and then it’s the father-son thing, and then the being-sixteen-years-old thing that has been in my notebook since I started wanting to be a writer. It said, you know, “A bag of bottles of beer in the snow.” I always wanted to write about that.

But from the second book on I never thought, I have to write about that moment. I would just start writing, and then I remember something, and then I write about that, and then I remember something else . . . and I like that, because then the moments will maybe not always be the important moments but could be the moments that are just beside the important ones. There’s a freedom in that.

In Book 6, on the other hand, you’re not journeying through the past. You’re describing things that have just happened.

The events I’m writing about are much closer to now, so they are much more precise. If I were to go back to the hotel and write about this encounter with you, I could write fifty pages about it, but if I were to recall when we met—like, two years ago?—it would be more vague. In that case, I would already have selected what was important. It’s two very different modes of writing.

In Book 6, you call “My Struggle” an “experiment” that has “failed.” What did you fail to do?

Well, you can never reach an authentic “I,” an authentic self. I think it’s impossible to free yourself from the social being you are. I remember seeing an interview with Ian McEwan where he used the word “selflessness,” and I really understood what he meant: that’s the dream for a writer. That’s a precious place to be—and if you are there then you are authentic.

But it’s not often that the writing goes there. I think of this book as many different modes and many different levels, and some are very close to me and authentic, and some are distant, and they contradict each other, and there’s a multitude, and that’s a self. I think I came as close as I could.

Was that the experiment? Getting closer to the self?

I had felt for many, many years that the form of the novel, as I used it, created a distance from life. When I started to write about myself, that distance disappeared. If you write about your life, as it is to yourself, every mundane detail is somehow of interest—it doesn’t have to be motivated by plot or character. That was my only reason for writing about myself. It wasn’t because I found myself interesting, it wasn’t because I had experienced something I thought was important and worth sharing, it wasn’t because I couldn’t resist my narcissistic impulses. It was because it gave my writing a more direct access to the world around me. And then, at some point, I started to look at the main character—myself—as a kind of place where emotions, thoughts, and images passed through.