“Your f—ing struggle.”

My novel, which had been given the title My Struggle 1, had been written in solitude. Apart from my publisher Geir Gulliksen and best friend Geir Angell, no one had read any of it along the way. A select few had been aware of what I was writ­ing about, among them my brother Yngve, but they knew none of the detail. After a year like that, where the only perspective that existed was my own, the manuscript was ready to be published. Four hundred and fifty pages, a story about my life centered around two events, the first being my mother and father splitting up, the second being my father's death. The first three days after he was found. Names, places, events were all authentic. It wasn't until I was about to send the manuscript to the people mentioned in it that I began to understand the consequences of what I had done. I sent it out in late June. Yngve had to be first. There were things I had written about him that I had thought and felt but never articulated. As I sat down at the computer and attached the document to the email I had written to him, I felt like dropping the whole thing, calling the publishers and telling them there would be no novel this year either.