Knausgaard Can’t Escape His Own Story

In contemporary literature there have been few genres so confusingly and consistently debated as autofiction. Though generally ill-defined, and often indistinguishable from memoir, the vague genre nonetheless enjoyed a return to critical prominence in the late 2000s and 2010s — authors such as Sheila Heti, Ben Lerner and Rachel Cusk became uniquely famous for novels full of lightly fictionalised, introspective riffs on the ambiguities of their actual lives. Though, of course, no name ultimately became more synonymous with the form than Karl Ove Knausgaard, the massively successful Norwegian novelist best known for his totemic six-volume My Struggle series, in which he detailed the most mundane, day-to-day (and sometimes hour-to-hour) activities of his adolescence, marriage, and experience of fatherhood.