Future recipient of the Kamala Harris Grant for Literary Podcasts is back! In this episode we finally get into the belly of the mackerel with a scene-by-scene breakdown of the first 15 or so pages of Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle: A Death in the Family. This is a new thing we're trying because we realized we hadn't actually talked about MS yet. But please be assured the interviews with people who have not read Knausgaard will continue!

We've been getting a lot of nice listener feedback and would love to keep hearing from you! Comments? Concerns? Guest suggestions? Thoughts on which of the four open sandwiches of the apocalypse you would choose? Especially if you're one of our 7 Israeli listeners, please write in! You can email Lauren ([email protected]), DM us on Twitter, or respond to our newsletter, which you should subscribe to if you haven't yet - ourstruggle.substack.com. (Please no comments on the audio in this episode, I forgot to wear headphones and make Drew as well so that's why it sucks and I'm sorry)

cheat sheet:

0:00 - Drew and Lauren ponder Mein Kampf vs. Harry Potter and their place in the canon of popular YA lit

9:14 - Finally we get to the famous first lines of book one! We discuss how these first few pages are composed, jewel-like and therefore strangely unlike the rest of this odd ramshackle annex of a book.

20:16 - Beginning of an interesting discussion about childhood details about how small observations made in childhood last through the rest of your life. We talk about pieces of media seen as children that made a huge impression on us as children (Lauren - 1974 Murder on the Orient Express; Drew - Tubgirl)

37:15 - We draw out one of Knausgaard's semi-thesis statements, about the inverse relationship between perspective and meaning. How crucial is 'epistemological openness' to the Knausgaardian project?

56:20 - An absolutely gruesome recap of a typical evening meal in the Knausgaard household in the 1970s. This somehow leads into one of our most rigorous intellectual discussions yet, regarding exactly which foods do and do not constitute so-called 'heterosexual cuisine.'

Thank you for listening and sorry again about the audio!

MUSIC - GUIDED BY VOICES 'Game of Pricks'

EDITING - LAUREN, THE MAN OF THE SHOW