The conclusion of My Struggle and what it signifies

So after 6 volumes and thousands of pages and months of reading and waiting for the next volume to come out in translation I have finished reading Karl Ove Knausgaard's monumental work, My Struggle. As noted yesterday, KOK concludes this publication with a painfully detailed account of his wife's mental illness, a we see the terrible effects of her bipolar disorder on the author, the family, and on Linda (his wife) herself. Over the course of this novel KOK has been unflinching in depicting himself in embarrassing and shameful moments, from his early childhood through his successful career as a writer and a father of 4. Often these painful moments are presented with some humor; in fact, the first account we get of his family life - at the outset of book 2 I think, in some ways foreshadows the devastation in book 6, but in a comical manner, as the family tries to have fun at an amusement park and everything goes wrong. Even in this final volume, comedy offsets the pain, at least early on - the disastrous family trip to the Canary Islands. The theme of this final volume concerns the reaction of the extended family, the press, and the world at large to the publication of the very novel we're reading; KOK is accused of creating a false image of his family (even though this is a work of fiction) and of raping a teenage girl (a topic of his first novel - again, it's fiction and not a public confession). Many family members - including his wife and her mother - accuse him of exposing too much of the family life to the public, in particular for violating the privacy of his own children. The detailed account of Linda's mental breakdown, with which KOK concludes the novel, is in a sense his thumbing his nose at all of the criticism: A writer must tell the truth as he or she sees and understands it, and the lives of others be damned. He is brave and undaunted till the end, but at what cost? He's achieved fame and fortune, literally, but has perhaps hurt his family beyond repair. And yet - the very last pages give us a surprising twist. (Spoilers here.) We see KOK and Linda - she is also an author - speaking at a festival about their works. Linda is recovered - though one has to think that managing bipolar will be a lifetime "struggle." KOK has exposed her in perhaps more pain and detail and suffering than any character in this novel, himself included. And then he concludes with the statement that he's glad to be done w/ this work, no matter the cost, as he will never write again. Though we know that is not correct - he has published (nonfiction) since completing My Struggle - it may be true in a symbolic way: the "character" who narrates My Struggle may be gone, ,and it may be that KOK believes his will never write fiction again. He has hovered on the border between recollection and imagination and now, it seems, he has purged his life of the most painful elements and is free to continue writing as a thinker, and observer, a smart reader, an essayist, and a journalist. Who's to say that's anything but brave?