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I didn’t want to wake up for work this morning, and when I did, I preferred to remain in my living room drinking coffee and reading the last pages of the last volume of Knausgaard’s My Struggle. I can’t help but think that he’s the most significant writer in the world right now — even if, inevitably, somehow, he will seem dated in a few years, and certainly within a decade, the way Bolano has already begun to seem a little outdated, or at least, unfashionable. Autofiction is so fashionable now though. I had a date with a woman visiting from London who is writing a book of ‘auto fiction’ — as opposed to fiction? — and at the end of the night, I could only see her, for various reasons, as blind, self-blinding, delusion, childish (however charming); that’s just how her personality seemed to me. Yet, I take a weird kind of pleasure, however, in imagining our six hour conversation, our many glasses of wine (which she promised to Venmo me her share for and never did), our somewhat awkward sex, reported from her perspective, in some future book, which may, though it may not, exist. The words skewing and skewering are so close together; there is no perspective that is not skewed, and thus skewers; there is no deployment of the autobiographical ‘I’ that cannot threaten to upset its surroundings.
