A Death in the Family by Karl Ove Knausgård

It’s hard to know what Graham Greene would have made of people telling their Twitter “followers” that they’re looking forward to seeing friends none of them have heard of.

Everyone wasn’t churning out “content” about their lives, their friends, and their half-naked benders, in a digital universe that has no end. But he said this at a time when writers were people who earned money by writing, and who published books. He said that every writer needed to have a “chip of ice in the heart”, knowing that anyone close to a writer was running a risk. Graham Greene knew quite a lot about this. They didn’t realise that the personal details of their lives were simply more fuel for a writer’s fire. They thought there was a part of life that was private. One person’s snapshot can be another’s distorting mirror.īut if you get it right, what happens then? Knausgaard’s friends and family aren’t upset because he got it wrong ran upset because what he has written is embarrassing and exposing, and because they thought that what happened in their lives wasn’t about to be shared with millions of people around the world. James Frey was publicly shamed by Oprah Winfrey when his memoir turned out to be A Million Little Fibs. Constance Briscoe’s mother sued her over the claims she made in her memoir, Ugly. Hanif Kureishi’s sister made a big fuss about the way her brother portrayed his family in his work. We know what happens when it all goes wrong. Should whales benefit from the pain of your relatives? Should that money go towards the airfares of Greenpeace’s international programme director, who commutes from Luxembourg to Amsterdam? But the question of what writers owe their families is as old as the squiggles on papyrus in Tutankhamun’s tomb.

“We got money,” he said in a newspaper interview this week, “and it scared me … I said to, Linda, maybe we should give it away to Greenpeace or something, because it came from an unethical project … “She just looked at me,” he added, “and said no.”Īs ethical dilemmas go, it certainly makes a change.

He has had so much hate mail he’s moved to Sweden. Half of Knausgaard’s family won’t speak to him. Global success hasn’t, it seems, made the “struggle” easier.

A Death in the Family by Karl Ove Knausgård