This article explores the relationship between style and structure in the first book of Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle series. A comparison of the stylistic features of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's The Confessions, Blake Morrison's And When Did You Last See Your Father?, and Knausgaard's My Struggle: Book One, illuminates the contradictory way in which key fictionalising aspects of style in autobiographical writingthe sense of immediacy, and the intertwining of honesty and spontaneitycan appear to bolster Philippe Lejeune's autobiographical pact in such a way as to potentially distort or overplay the writer's authority. The critical reception of My Struggle: Book One shows how reviewers are often complicit in reinforcing this distortion. This paper argues that Knausgaard deploys a neatly meshed range of strategies to counterbalance this potential effect of autobiographical writing, both through his modulating of style against the structural design of his book, and through the stance he adopts outside the work. The latter includes his deliberately ambiguous positioning of the book in terms of genre, and his deployment of a controversial title that both inflects the reading of the work and continues to generate considerable resonance in the discourse that surrounds it.
