Live from Family Brooklyn (ft. Willy Staley)

Our Struggle

October 31, 2021 The autumn has been long; and the weather, a mood. The leaves are perfectly gold here on the Gold Coast (that swathe of Brooklyn lining the East River - Cobble Hill, Brooklyn Heights, Boerum Hill, Carroll Gardens -- where the bourgeois-bohemian class reproduces) and soon I, William Staley (more commonly and phallicly known as Willy), will bundle my 8-month-old son into garb of a Gnome, and take him out into the fall crispness to experience his first Hallowe'en. But before I could go prepare to take candy from babies (it's a choking hazard) I had to endure a recording - something it seems more and more of my literary Brooklyn peers are subjected to these days. A man and woman appeared on my Zoom screen. They wanted to talk to me about A Man in Love, that is, the second book in the My Struggle series by Karl Ove Knausgaard. Shadowily (they were both backlit, in their respective lairs: the man, a Morningside heights railroad apartment; the woman, a half-finished suburban basement), they interrogated me about fatherhood, about my son's primordial essence. about carnivals. I answered gamely, and two and half hours later we still hadn't covered more than twenty pages of this book, this Struggle, but it was time for my son's nap and I begged to be allowed to end the call, to ply my son with his yarn tomato and squishy soccer ball in a bid to make him slumber, in preparation for this moment - his Halloween parade, his gnomic journey, his induction into the world of golden leaves and food co-ops. I rest for now. But something is tickling at the back of my brain. It's a line from the first page of this accursed donkey of a Norwegian's novel, which goes: "I have never understood the point of holidays, have never felt the need for them and have always just wanted to do more work." -- psst.... https://bookshop.org/shop/ourstruggle