One of my Pages is called “Memoirs”. There I talk about the continuing Memoirs project and its inspiration (or  otherwise) by  the writings of  recent authors. I’m repeating some of that here in this post.

While I still haven’t managed to read the whole of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s opus My Struggle (Volume Six still isn’t published in English anyway and some of them I just haven’t been able to get through) the way he wrote and published has been an inspiration.

Karl Ove Knausgard – publicity still

I really appreciate the way he didn’t feel obliged to follow the temporal sequence of his existence, but came out with things in what seemed to be almost episodically random order. The first published in English was A Death in the Family and he was writing it round about the same time as I was writing my own maternal mortality story. His revelations about his father, which caused a violent storm in his native Norway, were pretty gruesome. I had nothing so dramatic to contribute. My mother had done some pretty awful things but she was nothing like the kind of horror Karol Ove described his father to be. If anyone was a horror, it was me. Sixty-three at the time, I was still trying to excel in my career. I thought I was much more important than anybody else. This was not the frame of mind to be in when trying to help a 93 year old woman through the last year of her life.

Like most English readers I was gripped by Knausgaard’s second volume, A Man in Love, about his relation with his second wife and their family. The texture of everyday existence and his internal monologues as he did his best to live in ideologically correct Sweden and please his feminist wife, the only man taking his little child to pre-school singalongs where he spent the time lusting after the kindie teacher – what happens when you want to be a writer but aren’t allowed to – a woman’s story, now by a man.

His other books had less to  say to me, and I haven’t finished them all. Still, they are there on my Kindle and I dip in and out of them every once in a while. For all the sense of alienation and irritation Knausgaard is able to stir in me, I like the way he is trying to grapple with himself and come to terms with what a shit he was most of the time.

The second memoirist I must mention is the insanely popular Elena Ferrante (not. All the hoo-haa about who she “really” is has been quite absurd, unless you subscribe to the Author as Sacred Object school of literary identity). On the other hand there might be something to it because everything she has written seems to me completely fake.  I really and truly cannot read it. I have tried, started one book, then another, tried going into the middle of the first one, then the end of the third and honestly I have to say I just don’t get it.

One of these days I will try again. If Knausgaard is the masculine consciousness of the twenty-first century,  Ferrante is a feminine counterpart. Women seem to read books in order to identify themselves with the narrator, and in line with a lot of feminist theoretical work from the 1970s and 1980s, now largely ignored, it would seem that Ferrante works from the classic masochistic feminine position which a great many women still seem to find compelling and truthful for them.

Knausgaard on the other hand seems to me to exemplify the masochistic hysterical masculinism which our times have produced. This is not the place to conduct a forensic analysis of these writings, looming  large over the “serious” reading scene though they are. But the experience of tangling with them has sharpened up powerfully my sense of what memoirs can, or maybe cannot, do.