Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle is one of the most radical literary undertakings of the 21st century—a six-volume, 3,600-page excavation of the author’s own life, rendered in obsessive, excruciating detail. It is a book (or series of books) that blurs the boundary between fiction and memoir, pushing the limits of self-exposure and testing the patience of the reader.
The question at its core: Can literature achieve something greater when an author refuses to hide anything, even the mundane, the embarrassing, the shameful?
This is the same question that haunts THE AUTHOR by The Author.
Both novels are acts of self-destruction and reinvention. They center on protagonists who are their own worst enemies, men who expose themselves on the page not out of courage, necessarily, but because they have no other choice. And in both books, the story is not just what happens—it is how it is told, the overwhelming intimacy of the narrative voice, the way the reader is forced to sit uncomfortably close to the protagonist’s spiraling thoughts.
Where Knausgaard’s struggle is domestic—marriage, fatherhood, the weight of expectation—The Author’s struggle is existential. He is navigating a different battlefield: Hollywood, social media, the authenticity of artistry in the age of Everything-is-a-Brand.
Yet both men are after the same thing: Truth. Not objective truth, but personal truth—the kind of truth that gets you in trouble, that makes people hate you, that forces you to reckon with yourself.
One of the defining aspects of My Struggle is its relentless, almost pathological honesty. Knausgaard doesn’t just tell his story—he exposes himself. He writes about his failures, his pettiness, his humiliations, his moments of self-doubt and self-loathing, in a way that feels invasive, as though the reader is being allowed to witness something they shouldn’t.
THE AUTHOR by The Author operates in a similar space, but with an added layer of deception. The novel presents itself as a tell-all, a “semi-autobiographical” account of The Author’s rise in Hollywood. But The Author is a performer by nature—his entire life has been curated, edited, packaged for consumption. Even when he is at his most honest, there is the nagging question: Is this real? Is this confession, or just another performance?
This is where THE AUTHOR diverges from My Struggle. Knausgaard’s work is defined by its brutal sincerity—his struggle is to be understood, to tell the truth so completely that it burns away the artificiality of narrative itself. The Author, on the other hand, is never quite sincere, even when he wants to be. He is trapped in a world where authenticity is impossible, where even vulnerability is a commodity. He can never fully escape the machinery of self-presentation.
Yet both books recognize something essential about confession: The more you reveal, the more you control the story. By putting everything on the page, you strip others of the power to define you.
One of the most controversial aspects of My Struggle is Knausgaard’s willingness to document everything—not just the dramatic or pivotal moments of his life, but the smallest, most mundane details. He spends pages describing the act of brewing coffee, of walking through a grocery store, of waiting for a train. His approach is almost aggressively anti-plot, a rejection of conventional storytelling in favor of an unfiltered flood of experience.
THE AUTHOR by The Author takes the opposite approach—if My Struggle is a slow burn, THE AUTHOR is a detonated explosion. Every moment is heightened, every event melodramatically larger than life. Hollywood, by its very nature, demands spectacle. The Author does not have the luxury of mundanity. His struggle is not to exist, but to matter. He is not just living his life—he is selling it, monetizing it, turning it into a brand.
Yet beneath these differences, both books are obsessed with the same thing: What does it mean to be a person in the modern world? What does it mean to be a man, an artist, a father, a son? Both Knausgaard and The Author are chasing something real in a world that often feels unreal. The difference is that Knausgaard finds meaning in the small, quiet moments, while The Author is drowning in the noise.
One of the most painful threads in My Struggle is Knausgaard’s relationship with his father—a domineering, emotionally distant figure whose presence looms over the novel like a ghost. Much of the book is spent grappling with this relationship, trying to make sense of the man who shaped him, who he both fears and resents. The weight of this inheritance—of becoming the thing you hate—is one of the book’s most powerful themes.
THE AUTHOR by The Author engages with similar questions, though through a different lens. The Author is not haunted by a literal father, but by the idea of legacy, of what it means to leave something behind. He is terrified of irrelevance, of fading into obscurity, of failing to make his mark. Fame, for him, is not just about success—it is about meaning. Being worth a damn. Being defined as someone worth a damn.
Both books, in their own way, are about the crushing burden of expectation—whether from family, from society, or from oneself. And both protagonists respond in the only way they know how: by writing, by documenting, by trying to turn their messy, fractured lives into something that will last.
At first glance, My Struggle and THE AUTHOR by The Author could not be more different. One is a slow, meditative, almost punishingly detailed account of a man’s life. The other is a high-velocity, satirical fever dream about the dark underbelly of fame. Yet at their core, they are engaged in the same project: the search for selfhood in a world that makes it impossible.
If My Struggle is the great novel of the late 20th-century self—isolated, introspective, obsessed with truth—THE AUTHOR is the novel of the 21st-century self—fragmented, performative, trapped in an endless cycle of consumption and creation.
In the end, the tragedy of THE AUTHOR is not just that he is lost. It is that he no longer knows whether there was ever a self to find in the first place.
