When I learned Henry died, I was playing on the floor with my two-year-old daughter as a text arrived from a mutual friend; Henry had taken his life. His daughters no longer have their father, his wife, her partner, and I, my friend—who I once sat opposite at a wooden bar table, who listened as I said I was so depressed, so estranged from myself, and so numb that I seemed utterly removed from the world.
“That’s wild, man. I can’t fathom that,” Henry replied, throwing his hands up in disbelief. I was not offended by his incredulity; Henry bore such honesty that, despite the distance implied in his words (the unfathomable), it was what I most needed to hear.
A dozen others had shared our long table—colleagues, authors, editors, and publicists, all gathered in Chicago for our annual publishing convention. The clatter of plates and book talk was loud, yet Henry and I whispered to one another, about his pain and mine, the differences and convergences. He knew depression too, he said, leaning in, frothy beer in hand. We stayed long after everyone left. That night, a colleague pulled me aside and said, “it was like no one else was there, the way you two talked.” Whether she was scolding me or merely marveling, I’ve never known.
It was Dad who was supposed to die. It was that news I anticipated when the text about Henry arrived.
For ten months, Dad vacillated between a lonely apartment in Detroit and psych hospitals (what we now call behavioral health centers) in the greater metro area. Some of the hospitals were suitable, with fine food and kind doctors. Others were cold and isolating; causing him to obsess over his length of stay. “They want to keep me another week,” he groaned. However, I worried most when he was alone at home. That’s when I received all the Sad Dad calls, every few days when the insufferable brimmed and he tried not to implode. But that made it even worse, his restraint and repression. He bellowed into the phone, “how can life be this bad?”
Ten months of Sad Dad calls. The first arrived on my older brother’s birthday from a psych ward where calls only went out. He landed there after a wellness check request was made with the police. “Maybe you can tell your brother,” he asked, too labored by the idea of informing his eldest. “Ok, no problem,” I replied. “I’m calling him in a couple minutes to say happy birthday.” After a silent beat, Dad replied, “Oh right.” He had forgotten.
Ten months of different hospitals, prescriptions, clinicians and caregivers, group and individual therapy, ketamine, then finally ECT, electro-convulsive therapy. He underwent eight rounds, each time going under anesthesia then waking in a bed with no idea who he was or why he was there, a stricken body waiting for the film of memory to solidify.
Henry died in late May. In early July, Dad tried to take his life too. He had been home from the hospital only a week when he swallowed too much Xanax with too much Ambien. My stepmom could not wake him. I imagined her yelling “Cam, Cam” and shaking his body, raking his sternum with her knuckles. Dad was unconscious until evening, when he called me from another new hospital bed, his voice unintelligible and urgent. Wild, man.
Despair is unfathomable; its origins unknown and its destinations frightening. Desperate to help Dad, I researched better care facilities, including those that specialized in elder behavioral health. But they didn’t accept Medicare. I searched and found the ketamine clinic. But that was a flop too as it only exacerbated his anxiety. Then, having left all but one stone overturned, I queried my browser search bar; where is suicide legal and what logistics are involved with international assisted death?
We do not know what the abyss holds, but we sense its illimitable depths—its fathoms—from which despair emerges, like Radon seeping up from decayed soil. But here is what we do know: Henry understood his suicide would devastate his world, which can only mean he knew how monumentally he had already shaped it. Dad knew. Every Sad Dad call included an apology, for an imminent injury he refused to name. “I’m so sorry for what this will do to you and your brother.” And I would plead, alarmed by his use of future tense, “What do you mean? Tell me what you mean.”
“Hold your loved ones extra tight,” my friend offered when he told me Henry was gone.
***
Amidst crisis, routine life blinks onward. I went to work, washed the dishes, and did daycare pickups. I wrote and read some, and browsed the shelves of my local bookstore—named White Whale in a thrusting nod to literature’s most magnificent metaphor, the elusive Moby Dick, death itself. Holding my daughter on my hip, I bounced at the knees as I had learned to do since her birth, the buck and gravity a balm to her exhaustion. I scanned book spines, left to right, and stopped at My Struggle: A Death in the Family by Karl Ove Knausgård. “Have you read Knausgård,” a beaming colleague asked excitedly during our administrative meeting earlier that week. Spotting the book seemed fortuitous, then. I slipped the book from the shelf, read the back, and pushed it across the counter with my credit card.
Thus began my year with Karl Ove Knausgård, the prolific Norwegian writer whose 1998 debut won the most prestigious literary prize in Norway. His star shot only upward from there. After two award-winning novels, Knausgård pivoted into a new project: spanning forty years of his life, pendulating between childhood and adulthood, My Struggle is a six-volume, 3600-page autobiographical novel. Described as Proustian, a comparison I unequivocally endorse, Knausgård studies self-construction composed through the quotidian—childhood wounds, aesthetic pursuits, marriage, parenthood, drinking, sex, and fraught parental relationships. Notably, Knausgård writes with forensic attention to the textures of materiality. The human body breathing, walking, smoking, shitting, fucking, screaming, sleeping.
Knausgård explains: “I tried to break down the barriers between literature and life. It had slowly dawned on me that it was the world I was interested in, life here, existence, and not the literature about it, which was just one approach among many. I had gotten the two mixed up.” In exploring the boundary between life and literature, Knausgård practices uncompromising candor. Digressions, confessions, and contradictions stand. I’ve described the writing in this series as without ego; though the man himself said he merely tried to write life as it was.
Over the course of the year, I consumed all six volumes of My Struggle; they offered escape and solace as I slogged through a piss-shit year but at the end of which I became, without apology and with evangelistic aspirations, a Knausgård fanboy. Wild, man.
***
My two-year-old daughter knew something was wrong with Grandpa Cam. The day he tried to take his life, I went to the front porch, where my wife blew bubbles and ate drippy popsicles with her, and neutrally reported, “My dad overdosed this morning.” Our daughter doesn’t know the word “overdose,” but I wondered if she would intuit “tried to take his life,” so I didn’t say that. My wife’s eyes widened and she calmly replied, “Ok.” My daughter began to panic, looked at me and asked, “Where is Grandpa Cam? Is he over there? Is he over there,” pointing beyond the porch railing, preoccupied with knowing where he was, upon which part of earth he stood. Was he just beyond our porch where she could not see him?
We are private grievers in my family, distancing ourselves from one another to retreat into our interiors, to hurt without being seen. We remove ourselves. We don’t make a scene. I can’t imagine what it took for Dad to trespass this familial convention.
The day after Dad’s suicide attempt, I drove through labyrinth Pittsburgh rush hour to therapy, where I wept on a beige couch. I had been weeping in front of my therapist for months. Each time, she sat quietly with keen attention. She saw me and it was her seeing me that made me cry. I could barely stand her witness, her resolute intimacy, steadfast and sincere. “I want to flee into the mountains and sleep alone in a tent,” I told my therapist session after session. “I want to crawl inside the most remote place on earth and let it take me.” But she wouldn’t allow it.
***
Across public reflections on My Struggle, readers repeatedly frame their relationship to the books in incredulous but sympathetic terms: what is it about this novel and why is it so gripping? Most answer their own question by suspecting it’s because we find ourselves, our stories even, in Knausgård. I know this was my experience. The exhibition of his childhood feels familiar—the depictions of running wild with friends, discovering a love for literature and music, even his shyness and sensitivities. It all feels simultaneously personal and universal. “I” becomes “we,” as Knausgård writes. And We become deeply connected.
After I finished Book One, months slipped away into Spring, until May—the month we lost Henry—when I was in Berkeley, California visiting my brother. I discovered a gently used copy of Book Two: A Man in Love at Caliban Books, minutes before my brother and I sat down to dinner and, for three hours, discussed Dad’s pain, Mom’s decline, the players in our extended family, everyone toiling and aging. What can we do? “What is there to do,” my brother sighed. Our waitress wore out her patience on us. “My shift ends now,” she said, handing us the bill.
I read Book Three a few weeks later on the beaches of Luz, Portugal where my daughter dug holes in the sand, the Atlantic azure and gleaming against the shoreline. I read Book Four in my in-laws Midwest living room while my daughter stumbled after her older cousins and alongside her Oma and Opa during their annual summer cousin camp. I read Book Five on the 93 bus line, on my way to work as the sun rose over the city.
***
Summer deepened into long days and heavy humidity. On the Fourth of July weekend, my wife, daughter, pup, and I drove to Forbes State Forest to camp over the holiday, because fireworks scare our dog so much she shakes and pants and we need to leave the city.
In the morning, as my daughter snored and snuffled beside me, still dreaming in her sleeping bag, I studied the pines swaying over us, listened to the bullfrogs belching in the pond, where the night before we threw bits of bread to the slow-roving fish. My daughter and I were together, like Dad and I when I was a child, under a nylon canopy. He is the man who made me love what’s wild, who taught me to love the unknown world, to journey into remote spaces and bear witness. That’s what he did as a young man, watching whales breach off the coast of British Columbia. “I’m so proud of you guys,” he told my brother and I, because we struck out from suburban Michigan and made our own way, despite the distance it forged among us.
When we got home from camping, our dirty gear scattered across the kitchen floor, I texted Dad photos of my daughter standing at the fire ring with the detritus of smores smeared across her face. I was proud to sustain our family tradition. He didn’t respond. He was already non-responsive in his bed across Lakes Erie and Huron.
***
Book Six, the literary community decided, is where Knausgård either goes off the rails (a 500-page essay on Hitler? For real?) or where it all comes together: his attention to the quotidian is also an effort to disentangle literature and life. His reckoning with death, intellectually and personally, is about human fathoms. His study of fascism takes us full circle, back into the abyss, into the unfathomable.
I learned some readers skip the 500-page essay on Hitler, because the shift from the other 3000 pages is too dramatic. And in 2025, I wonder about skipping it too, wary of allocating more mental space to fascism. (As I wrote this essay during the Jewish holidays, gunmen attacked Jewish celebrants on Bondi Beach, killing fifteen, including a child). But for all Knausgård has given me, I owe it to him and, even more importantly, myself to attend his question:
From where does unimaginable violence—fascist organizing, the Holocaust, mass death and mass shootings—come. Or, perhaps, from who. The question isn’t rhetorical; Knausgård sets about answering it, insisting we delve into the question and position it within the commons of our humanity.
When we talk about the unfathomable, we must try to fathom. We must not turn away but give witness. Removing ourselves from materiality prohibits a true reckoning of who we are and what the hell we’re doing. Abstraction makes life conceptual. (“It was the world I was interested in, life here, existence.”) Indeed, Knausgård inaugurates the My Struggle series by reflecting on cultural purification of death, how quickly we remove a dead body from the scene of its passing, cover the body in a sheet or zip it into a body bag, how we organize the memorial in mere days then send them into the ground. How we abstain from publicly disclosing the cause of death as suicide.
“A town that does not keep its dead out of sight, that leaves people where they died, on highways and byways, in parks and parking lots, is not a town but a hell. The fact that this hell reflects our life experience in a more realistic and essentially true way is of no consequence. We know this is how it is, but we do not want to face it. Hence the collective act of repression symbolized by the concealment of our dead.”
As Knausgård was writing My Struggle, the deadliest mass attack in his homelands since World War 2 occurred. First a car bomb in Oslo, followed by a mass shooting at a summer camp in Utøya. Seventy-seven people were murdered. Including children. I think about Uvalde and Parkland and Sandy Hook. How does this happen? What leads someone to commit such unutterable violence?
I’ve asked these questions since ninth grade when Columbine rattled every school hall across the U.S. Over 25 years later, I am forced into these questions again and again. Thirteen mass shootings occurred as I wrote this essay. But I’ve always assumed that to speculate on any real answer would be to humanize atrocity. But that is exactly what Knausgård asks of us: we must make human what seems Other. Evil is easier to abide if ostracized from the human realm, made to come from somewhere else.
Through five hundred pages, Knausgård un-abstracts horror by leveling it into the commons.
Remove kills us. This is what I felt sitting across the table from Henry. Removed and like I was dying. The further remote we are from the materiality of human life, abstractions enlarge, take on politicizations and polemics and conspiracy theories. Intimacy, then, nurtures connection, assembles us into relationships with literature and music, sex and conversation, food and soil. A father and child camping. A girl digging holes in the sand. Intimacy may not bid explanation for pain. The depths will always be unfathomable, but we can approach the rim of the abyss.
Henry and Dad knew the cost of cutting short their lives, but that knowledge doesn’t keep anyone here. And yet here is where we are.
***
I finished Book Six, the final volume of My Struggle, on a direct flight from Pittsburgh to Phoenix for a long weekend with my paternal cousins. The tome consumed half my small backpack, my only luggage. I sacrificed deodorant and hair products to make it fit. My cousins, brother, and I were gathering in the arid landscape to reconnect, to play pickleball in the dry heat, to watch the Detroit Lions game, to talk around the breakfast table. We rode horses at twilight, through rock and sand, through the homeland of the spiral cacti. “It takes at least 70 years for just one arm to begin to appear.” Dad told me this, twisting his body back to see me under the amber scrim of twilight, where I sat on Spirit, my tan horse, a “snuggler” the handlers (cowboys?) said. Dad rode Inky, a black and white steed, the most well-behaved among us. Inky. Fortuitous we decided, as Dad is a writer and relied on his craft to attempt survival. “I put all my writing in an envelope for you. I want you to have it,” he said months earlier. The envelope was on his kitchen table, he explained. “You can give it to me yourself,” I said, refusing his allusion to departure.
Dad surprised me in the Phoenix airport, having decided to join my brother, cousins, and I for our desert weekend. A few months prior, it was impossible to imagine him leaving his bed, much less the house to fly across state lines. Dad was recovering. Wild, man.
***
My dear Henry. We listened to music together, trading mixed CDs, and organized a writing group wherein we wrote poems and none were very good. We had parties. Like the one where the morning after I woke to knocking, opened the door and—I must have looked like shit, hungover with alcohol and sweat seeping from my pores—there was Henry, returning for his coat, saying with a smirk, “Oh boy,” at the sight of me, which made me laugh despite myself.
Henry moved from Michigan to Texas with his wife and girls while I moved from Michigan to Oregon then Pennsylvania. Whenever I listened to indie hip hop—Brother Ali, Dessa, Atmosphere—I thought about Henry. Whenever I needed a laugh, he was there to talk shit, just like he was there to talk through pain. We were so different, yet we kept finding one another. But these are only stories, traces, and objects that orbit the man; they are not the man. Not Henry. Because Henry is gone. And while I cannot fathom it, I can pay witness.
Note: Karl Ove Knausgård will be speaking as part of Pittsburgh Arts and Lectures on January 15th at 7 P.M.
