The Various Struggles in Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle: An Incomplete List

~ thomas
  1. The struggle to be a good father.
  2. The struggle to get over his own father.
  3. The struggle with readers who don’t recognize that naming the books My Struggle is partly a joke.
  4. The struggle with readers who don’t recognize that naming the books My Struggle is partly serious.
  5. The struggle of isolation and loneliness.
  6. The struggle to write.
  7. The struggle to write.
  8. The struggle to write.
  9. The struggle of being a younger brother.
  10. The struggle of shyness.
  11. The struggle with car seats, strollers, and trying to get from point A to point B with small children.
  12. Shame. So much shame.
  13. The struggle with alcoholism and its legacies.
  14. The struggle of a marriage (or two).
  15. The struggle of what to say at parties.
  16. The struggle of what to say at home.
  17. The struggle of mental illness.
  18. The struggle of being oneself (Monday. Me. Tuesday. Me. Wednesday. Me. Thursday. Me.).
  19. The struggle to find a home.
  20. The struggle to escape the home one has. (Argentina, a working title for the novel, still fits, I think).
  21. The struggle to remember what to pick up at the grocery store.
  22. The struggle between the Romantic ideal of The Artist and the reality that the children need their muesli and yogurt in the morning.
  23. The struggle for meaning in the face of absurdity and death.
  24. The struggle of a Norwegian living in Sweden.
  25. The struggle of navigating masculinity in an increasingly feminized society.
  26. The struggle of desire.
  27. The struggle of standing in the middle of an airport with a mound of luggage and gaggle of crying children and no luggage cart in sight (“Help!” She shouted in a loud voice. “Help us!”).
  28. The struggle of being seen.
  29. The struggle of being hidden.
  30. The struggle of the toddler as 5am alarm clock.
  31. The struggle of literature’s distance from real life.
  32. The struggle of this particular literary work’s closeness to real life.
  33. The struggle of trying not to cry (and failing).
  34. The struggle to get the beer to the party in the snow on a New Year’s Eve.
  35. The struggle to prevent the apartment from degenerating into a visible incarnation of the universe’s drive towards entropy.
  36. The struggle of friendship.
  37. The struggle of finding and celebrating beauty under the cynical eye of modernity.
  38. The struggle to find a moment to enjoy a cup of coffee and a cigarette in peace.
  39. The struggle towards that point where the author can finally say: “I am no longer a writer.”