Some points on Knausgaard's views on fiction

A few points on Karl Ove Knausgaard's thoughts on the process of writing fiction, which he raises in one of his many notable long asides/digressions at about p. 150 in Book 6: First, I was struck by his observation that when we are children we think our world comprises limitless, at least thousands, of people, but by midlife - he's at age 40 when writing this - we come to realize that there are only a few hundred people in our lives and that these hundreds have shaped everything about us. He has tried in My Struggle to incorporate all of the significant people in his life, and it's vital to him that he understand and communicate exactly how these others have shaped the life he is leading - some profoundly, some peripherally. His writing process, like that of all writers of what we now call "autofiction," involves the uncovering and breathing back into life of many memories and encounters, many from people quite distant from his present life. But he makes another observation: He was not aware, until actually fact-checking his first volume (in 2009) that all of these people whom he has summoned from his bank of memories, are completely reachable and accessible to him - just a phone call away, he notes (today, we would probably say just a few clicks away) - in fact he reached easily the love of his teenage years, who was delighted to hear from him and had followed his literary career. Second point, KOK writes at some length about what he calls the "Romantic I" as a narrator/author, and he correctly notes that, beginning with the Romantic era, i.e., early 19th century, writers began to strive for the individual and unique in their writing - to make their work distinctly and only their own (as opposed to working in a grand mimetic tradition). So it's vital to him that My Struggle maintain his voice (even though its style is not high-literary, w/ few metaphors, analogies, or purely atmospheric passages) and, a third point, that it remain precisely true to the facts as best he can recollect them. Is this, however, a mirror-trick of narration? If the facts are primary, why does he present this massive work as fiction? He obviously needs the leeway to invent - particularly regarding reconstructed dialog from decades ago. So it's the narrator of a novel who argues for the primacy of fact - but maybe this narrator has some distance from the author, who may not concur with this literary dicta. Fourth, KOK has been often criticized if not mocked for his fixation on detail - describing the oatmeal he eats on a give morning, for ex., like who cares? - and in Book 6 he goes even farther toward that extreme, w/ much minutia about his child-care activities. What is the point of this? I think, once again, he's trying to ground this novel in reality, in the facts, so as to give greater credence to his grander observations and more dramatic encounters and obsessions. But more of this to come.