Karl Ove Knausgård

Karl Ove Knausgård is the author of the autobiographical novels, My Struggle.

From his Q & A with Jesse Barron at The Paris Review:

Did you keep diaries when you were young?

Yes, I did, but I burned them when I was twenty-five or twenty-six.

Why?

I was so embarrassed, I couldn’t stand it. It’s the same with Min Kamp, I can’t stand it. If I could I would burn that, too, but there are too many prints, so it’s impossible.

Life develops, changes, is in motion. The forms of literature are not. So if you want the writing to be as close to life as possible—I do not mean this in any way as an apology for realism—but if you want to write close to life, you have to break the forms you’ve used, which means that you constantly have the feeling of writing the first novel, for the first time, which means that you do not know how to write. All good writers have that in common, they do not know how to write.

But isn’t burning a novel different from burning a diary? Burning a diary is repudiating a former version of yourself.

It’s one thing to be banal, stupid, and idiotic on the inside. It’s another to have it captured in writing. When I started to write more systematically, I just couldn’t stand that bastard diarist-self, and I had to...[read on]

--Marshal Zeringue