In 2018, the celebrated Norwegian author wrote what was, for him, a surprisingly concise piece for magazine on how the very worst thing a writer could lumber themselves with – worse even than haemorrhoids or an active Instagram account – was ownership of a dog. “ have never interested me,” he confessed, explaining he’d been afraid of them growing up and had only got one later in life when his young daughter insisted upon it. He resented the dog’s presence in his home, not merely because “it pulled on its leash as hard as it could, dug holes in the lawn, and was never properly house-trained”, but because by all accounts it left him – a man who can seemingly write on any subject, no matter how quotidian, and always at great length – with writer’s block.
“In the two years we had it, I didn’t write a single line of literary prose,” he complained, adding that, “I’m not blaming the dog” – before doing pretty much that. (A year or so later, in 2020, he published a new novel, , which ran to 688 pages: writer’s block no more.) I first came across Knausgaard’s piece on my phone while sitting on a park bench one hot summer’s day, my own dog spatchcocked beneath me in the shade, refusing to move.
Like Knausgaard, I am a writer, but where he is Manchester City in the literary league table, I’m Accrington Stanley. Nevertheless, while I love the solitude of the writer’s life, I’m also aware of just how claustrophobic and necessarily interior i.