This week’s story, “Come Together,” is adapted from your forthcoming book, “My Struggle: Boyhood.” It’s the third volume in a six-volume series of autobiographical novels, which were first published in Norway. This one covers your childhood on the southern Norwegian island of Tromøy, in the nineteen-seventies and eighties. How much did you remember of that period in your life before you started writing?
When it comes to memories of that iconic type, memories that are burned into you, I have maybe ten or so from my childhood. I’m a bad rememberer of situations. I forget almost everything as soon as it happens. But when it comes to landscapes and rooms, it’s different. I think I remember every single room that I have been in from the age of seven. What I did was to place myself in those rooms, and when I started to write about them it was like unlocking a thousand small doors, all leading further into childhood. It’s all there, you know, inside us, it’s just a matter of finding the way.
The excerpt covers the young Karl Ove’s growing fascination with girls, and with one girl in particular, Kajsa, a student at a neighboring school. You capture perfectly a particular combination of cockiness and cluelessness that marks the onset of adolescence, while managing to keep the judgment of an older, wiser self at bay. Was that a tricky thing to do? Did you feel that you were experiencing the depths of romantic humiliation all over again as you were writing?
The tricky thing was, indeed, to refuse my older and more experienced self any space in the text. Everyone wants to be clever—it’s hard to give up that side and go blindly for stupidity. But even more frightening was the fact that it was so easy—that this combination of cockiness and cluelessness, as you so precisely pin it down, was apparently still very close to my present self. I guess I have a talent for humiliation, a place within me that experience can’t reach, which is terrible in real life, but something that comes in handy in writing. It seems as though humiliation has become a career for me.
Did you ever hear from Kajsa again? Do you know if she read the book?
No, I haven’t heard from her. Considering the amount of publicity surrounding these books, I’m pretty sure she’ll have read it, though.
Your father is a pivotal figure in “My Struggle”—he’s a controlling, discomforting presence in the family when you’re a child, and an absent, confounding one when you’re older. As a boy, you’re constantly aware of his moods and his expectations and the narrow parameters of acceptable behavior within the home. Yet one of the exhilarating aspects of “Boyhood” is how much freedom you have when you’re not at home. That’s what’s covered in this excerpt, where you can make the forests of Tromøy your own. How great a tension was there in your childhood between your life in the home and your life outside?
That’s the dynamic force in this book, its motor: the difference between the freedom outside and the prison-like state inside, and how the latter very slowly influences the former, and in the end changes it fundamentally. Another word for that would be integration, I think. The eye of God ends up inside, so that, in the end, you take care of judgment and punishment yourself. When I look back at that freedom of childhood, which is in a way infinite, and at all the joy and the intense happiness, now lost, I sometimes think that childhood is where the real meaning of life is located, and that we, adults, are its servants, that that’s our purpose.
Do you think a child growing up on Tromøy today will be having a similar childhood to yours? Or did your experience reflect a particular moment in time?
Actually, I went back a couple of years ago to the place where I grew up. There was a lot of snow, it was freezing cold, and the street outside our house, which was crawling with kids in the seventies, all playing in the snow, was completely deserted. Not a soul around. Where were they? In their rooms, behind their computers, I guess. It’s the same thing with my own children—if they can choose, they prefer computer games, mobile phones, films, indoors activities. But their feelings—that sensation of being eight or nine—are, of course, the same.
As a boy, you were obsessed by music. Does it mean as much to you today? Can it capture the emotional tenor of your life in the same way?
Music goes straight to the heart, it doesn’t have to check in on the intellect first, so, yes, music is still important to me. I’m very much frozen emotionally—that’s how it is to be an adult; it wouldn’t work if the world was as close at it was in childhood—but in music, everything is melting. For a while, that is.
Your older brother, Yngve, is the person you turn to for advice here, about both music and girls. What does he think of the part he plays in your writing? Does he remember events the same way you do? And are you still benefitting from his taste in music?
When he first read about himself, he said that everything went black. (His first e-mail after reading had the title “Fuck you”—to scare me, I think. He still likes to do that.) And he never quite got used to it. But he has never asked me to change anything. He basically shares my view of what happened in our childhood, but he thinks that I was too easy on our father, that I’ve justified him too much. He, being the oldest, took the hardest blows, I guess. When it comes to music, I’m hopelessly lost in the indie-world of the eighties, no longer capable of being saved, even by a still well-oriented older brother.
