A few years ago I read the first two books of Knausgaard’s My Struggle series. I remember the feverish way I read through them; only deciding to stop because I was afraid to admit how much time I spent greedily eating his thoughts. I’m re-reading notes I took at the time. They make me want to dive back in to My Struggle. He wrote, for example, “I read Hauge’s diaries. All 3,000 pages. It was an enormous consolation.” I suppose that’s why I read his books; they were consoling.
And here, he writes about the need for solitude. “I require huge swaths of loneliness and when I do not have it, which has been the case for the last five years, my frustration can sometimes become almost panicked or aggressive. And when what has kept me going for the whole of my adult life, the ambition to write something exceptional one day, is threatened in this way my one thought, which gnaws at me like a rat, is that I have to escape.”
In the second book he writes: “I was preoccupied, to an unusually high degree, by being liked, and always had been, ever since I was small. I had attached huge importance to what other people thought about me ever since I was seven.” Seven? I thought. That's very young. Then, as I comb through my memories and picture myself at seven, I find proof. I too, at seven, wanted to be liked.
Until we moved into a house, my mom, dad, brother, sister and I, lived on the 17th floor of an apartment building in downtown Saskatoon. Among its residents were kind old people who made my parents’ acquaintance on elevator rides. There was a lady named Pearl whose apartment was full of surfaces softened with crochet and lace. And there was a man whose name I do not remember who would slip me two Werther's candies while my mom and I waited in the lobby for the school bus. I wasn’t allowed to eat sugar but I would bring them to school and before the bell rang to offer them to classmates. I became the center of attention for a few brief moments while I picked more-or-less randomly two benefactors from among the many outstretched hands, and the faces that said “me! me! me!”
Ah Knausgaard! Authors by expressing themselves allow readers to recognize themselves and I am grateful.