Karl Ove was with me when I got into bed at night, before my husband demanded that we turn out the lights. There was always a volume of My Struggle with me, and thus Karl Ove, or the version of Karl Ove that Karl Ove had seen fit to enshrine on the page, was with me. (This is usually how I feel about good things: The book that I myself wrote, for example, or sometimes, the children I gave birth to.) How had I, a person genuinely awe-struck by people who do half-marathons, so cheerfully signed up for the greatest feat of endurance in contemporary letters? The Knausgaard assignment felt like a metaphor for other things in life-everything I have ever enrolled in and then realized, with absolute certainty and invariably too late, that I do not have the constitution for. It is true that my anxiety was more dispersed than it might have been, but it was still there in quantity. I developed a “bit.” “How are you feeling about your book?” someone might ask, and I would say, jauntily, “I’m glad I have this Karl Ove Knausgaard thing looming, because it means I can’t even be anxious about my own book, haha.” This was not entirely true. But that writer had male authority, and I don’t. The writer who first interviewed him for the same program, I suspected, did not read all of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s works to prepare.
I was going to read them all, I told myself, and I also told this to the somewhat incredulous organizers. I put these together in a pile and added the book he wrote about soccer, and noted down the names of his earlier books. In early summer I obtained the six volumes of My Struggle, and the four volumes of the Seasons Quartet. My first book was published on September 4, and I was supposed to interview the writer Karl Ove Knausgaard in front of an audience on September 24.