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Karl Ove Knausgaard: All it took was one person to tell me I was good enough
Norweigan writer Karl Ove Knausgaard, 47, whose series of six searingly honest autobiographical novels, My Struggle, have sold millions of copies and earned him critical plaudits around the world, looks back on the above photograph – a time when literary success felt unimaginable.
“My brother, Yngve, took this photograph of me when I was about 17 years old, a fresh undergraduate at the Writing Academy in Bergen. Yngve saw himself as a photographer, so practised a lot with portraits of me.
You can almost see in it that classic, angst-ridden teenage boy starting in a new city: lonely and cripplingly insecure – especially around girls – but balancing that with an extremely high opinion of himself. We were in a post-punk band, Yngve and I, and there are countless other photos where we’re posing like bad impersonations of the English groups we were obsessed with, such as Echo and the Bunnymen.
It probably explains my intense look here. That, of course, and the fact that I saw myself as a real writer. I arrived in Bergen full of excitement and expectation, thinking I’d have that talent confirmed. As it was, though, the opposite happened.
In my teens, I wrote short stories, mostly about young men and freedom, in the style of Kerouac or Hemingway, and sent them around for appraisal. I’d make 10 copies and post them to friends and family in Norway, in the hope they’d rate them good enough to be published. But Yngve read one and said, ‘Yeah, it’s good, but you don’t honestly think anybody would publish it, do you?’
I suppose judgments like that are what brothers are there for, but his comments completely devastated me, and they came repeatedly in Bergen. There, especially in my creative-writing school, my work met with so much resistance and criticism that I lost all faith in my abilities.
I started studying literature and wrote criticism, then began a course in art history. I met a fellow student who’d also been published as a fiction writer. He showed a story of mine to his editor, who put it into an anthology and then asked me if I had anything else. I instantly quit studying to write something – anything – that could get me in print again. That was all it took for me to start believing in myself again: one person telling me I was good enough.
All these years later, I cannot stand to look at pictures of my own face. When I make myself look at the young man in this photo, though, I want to tell him to enjoy his life. Things will sort themselves out, I’d tell him, because they always do. And they did.”
Some Rain Must Fall (Vintage, £8.99), translated by Don Bartlett, the fifth book in Knausgaard’s autobiography series My Struggle, is out in paperback now