A Death in the Family (My Struggle #1)

by Karl Ove Knausgård

I had always liked staying the night with other families, having your own room with a freshly made bed, full of unfamiliar objects, with a towel and facecloth nicely laid out, and from there straight into the heart of family life, despite there always being, no matter whom I visited, an uncomfortable side, because even though people always try to keep any existing tensions in the background whenever guests are present, the tensions are still noticeable, and you can never know if it is your presence that has caused them or whether they are just there and indeed your presence is helping to suppress them. A third possibility is, of course, that all these tensions were just ‘tensions’, which lived their own lives in my head.