What It’s Like to Be Written About by Karl Ove Knausgaard

A depressed Norwegian novelist. An enthusiastic young American photographer. A road trip through the midwest… it sounds like the plot of an indie comedy. But it’s real: The New York Times hired novelist Karl Ove Knausgaard to write a two-part travel piece in North America. Knausgaard is famous for his six-volume novel -- in fact thinly disguised memoir -- called My Struggle, in which seemingly every detail of his life is recorded. The second part of Knausgaard’s U.S. travelogue is published in the New York Times Magazine this weekend, and it’s less about America than it is about Knausgaard and his own struggles to report the piece. Perhaps unwittingly, the photographer assigned to take pictures for the story ended up being a major character in it. We hear from him about what it’s like to get the Ove Knausgaard treatment.